


The Supernatural Adventures of Ellie Singer

by lucyinthefandom



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Related, Gen, May contain triggers, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Original Character-centric, Originally Posted on Tumblr, POV Female Character, Parental Bobby Singer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 04:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 94
Words: 353,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3715384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucyinthefandom/pseuds/lucyinthefandom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an exploration of how Supernatural might have gone down if it had a major female character for the majority of its run. The narrator is Ellie Singer, who joins the Winchesters for their never-ending hunting roadtrip. It follows along with canon episodes, inserting Ellie into the action and when appropriate, diverging from canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1: Reunion

A lot of folks would think a scrapyard ain’t ideal as a playground. Great rusty hulks of cars, all sharp edges and leaking oil. Sure, there’s lots of ways you can hurt yourself, if you ain’t being careful. Maybe we got a nasty scratch a time or two, but that’s why you get your tetanus shots, right?

That scrapyard was my kingdom. It was my desert island and my theme park and my Wonderland. I’d take my dolls on wild adventures, climbing mighty peaks of scrap metal like they was Everest. I learned to draw with fat crayons, sitting on the roof of a junked car, trying to capture the way shining chrome became rusted browns.

My daddy used to worry I was a lonely kid. Maybe sometimes I was, but I don’t think so. My mama was always just a vague memory, a sweet thought at the back of my mind. I remember she smelled real nice, and I remember the taste of her pies. Maybe they weren’t as good as I remember them but I guess I’ll never know. I never knew her well enough to miss her. I had my father and he had me and we were a happy little unit. Sometimes, he’d go away and I’d be left in town with some nice lady or other. They’d always feel bad for me, poor little motherless kid. There was cake.

But my dad would come home, with stories about the Hunt. Vampires in Minnesota. A pair of werewolves way down in Texas. He always brought me back something. Sometimes a doll or a wooden truck. Sometimes it was just a shiny rock or some cheap bright bangle. But there was always a present and a story, and the postcards. Every little backwater town he went to, he looked for a postcard to bring home to me.

Sometimes, though, it was us doing the babysitting. John Winchester I remember as a dark stern man in a leather jacket. He was never mean to me or anything, but I always felt he didn’t like me. He was a single dad, with two boys. Maybe he just didn’t know what to say to a little girl. Either way, I could sense that things between him and my daddy weren’t always rosy. All the same, he’d come round maybe twice a year, drop off the boys and head out on a hunt.

They called my dad Uncle Bobby. I never called their dad Uncle John. But the boys were okay. They weren’t like the other kids at school. They were hunter kids. Like me. They knew enough to be afraid of the dark.

Dean was three years older than me, and didn’t he know it? He wasn’t a bully but he liked to tease me. Nothing cruel. Just silly kids jokes like holding things out of my reach or making cracks about my age. “You’re too young to understand”: that was his favourite. All of twelve years old and he liked to pretend like he was the depository of all worldly knowledge. Of course, he didn’t know squat, but I didn’t know that. I thought he was keeping deep dark secrets from me.

Sammy was a year younger than me. Scrawny kid, he looked even younger. He was kinda bookish and even during summer holidays he’d be reading. He used to ask what books I read for school, and he’d borrow them. I was a year ahead, so he always wanted to know what I’d been learning. I let him look through my homework. Guess he was trying to get ahead of the game. Can’t have been easy, moving from school to school all year. Maybe it would have been better to let him stay with us, go to my school, give him some stability. But I guess John wanted his kids around when he could.

Sam was always up for a game of hide and go seek and sometimes even Dean would play, though he’d pretend to be above it. He’d roll his eyes like it was a drag and he was just playing because Sammy and I wanted to. But he would laugh like he enjoyed it. Then their dad would come back and they’d be different. Same kids but suddenly older.

Dean was my first crush. I was thirteen that year and he was an impressively grown up sixteen. Sam was going to stay with us a little while, but John and Dean were going to go away on a hunt. They stayed the night first. I don’t know if it was something about the way he acted, or the way he looked or the way he dressed, or maybe all three. I just remember setting the table for dinner, while he was cleaning his dad’s guns. I had butterflies in my stomach. I wanted him to look at me but at the same time I was terrified that he would. I’d never felt like that before. I honestly thought I was sick.

When they’d gone and Sam was in bed, I went to my dad and asked about it. Worst day of his life, maybe. His only child, sweet little girl, crushing on a bad boy hunter kid. He wasn’t prepared for The Talk, but he did okay, I reckon.

It was maybe two years later when they stopped coming. I wasn’t home when it happened, but John argued with my dad about something. I got home from school when dad said if he ever saw John Winchester on his property again, he’d shoot him in the ass. If you think he didn’t mean it, you don’t know my daddy.

Anyway… I guess all that is by way of explaining how I felt when I saw it. A black ‘67 Chevy Impala. Beautiful car. Louder than Hell itself, possibly, but what a looker!

I was leaning against an old Buick when I heard it roll into the yard. The car wasn’t going anywhere, but the interiors were custom. I’d spent the morning ripping them out, and was taking a break that I thought I’d pretty well earned.

So there I was, hot as hell, down to my tank-top, beer in hand, and I heard the roar of an engine. Oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Until that Impala rolled into view and I remembered everything.

_Hope dad’s got ammo_ , I thought to myself.

There were two guys in the car, and I couldn’t see 'em that well, but neither of them was old enough to be John, which left an obvious conclusion. Seeing I was there, the driver pulled the car over and put it in park.

I got up off the Buick, took another sip of my beer and strode over to the car.

Guy driving had to be Dean. He’d changed since I saw him last, but not enough that I didn’t recognise him. He wound down the window and gave me the once up and down.

“Well hiya, sweetheart,” he said, leaning out his window. “Can you help us out? We’re looking for an old friend.”

Sweetheart? Clearly, he didn’t recognise me. I’d have choked on my own euphoria if he’d called me that when I was fifteen.

“Uh… Dean?” said the other guy.

The guy in the passenger seat seemed kinda nervous. He was a little harder to reconcile with my childhood memories than his big brother. But I gotta give credit where it’s due. Gawky Sammy Winchester grew up nice. Aged like a fine wine, and just as tasty, if you know what I mean.

“Dean,” he said again. “I… I think this _is_ an old friend.”

Dean looked me over again. “Ellie?” he asked. “You’re little Ellie Singer?”

I spread my hands out wide on either side of me, to say “Yep. This is me, this right here. What you see is what you get.”

While his brother raised two eyebrows, Sam was already getting out of the car. He slammed the door after him and walked over to me, arms wide open. Before I knew it, I was pulled into a hug, trying not to spill my beer.

One thing I couldn’t see when I was in the car, but he was huge. He must have been at least six foot two or three. Broad across the shoulders, he was like a plaid and denim mountain. Once he released me, I could see he was grinning.

“Wow, Ellie. I haven’t seen you in what, seven years? Eight?”

“Eight,” I said, as Dean got out of the car. He had a hug for me too.

“Y'all didn’t bring your daddy, then?” I asked. “Cos…”

A dark look passed between the brothers and I realised I’d said something wrong. Perhaps John had died and I was now a super-insensitive asshole.

“That’s kinda why we’re here, kid,” said Dean. “So… is your dad home?”

And that’s how it all started, I guess.

 

* * *

 

Half an hour later, I was frantically trying to clean up the den. I guess I take after my mom in some ways. It’s one thing for us to be living in our own mess, but guests shouldn’t have to see that. Dean was in the process of passing dad’s silver and holy water tests, while Sam was at the desk, reading the Key of Solomon. I tried to work around them, shuffling behind Sam to get at empty plates. To get a book back onto the shelf, I had to get between Dean and my father. I stretched up and over Dean to get the book back, and he gave me a playful wink.

“I saw that, boy,” said Dad, handing him a flask.

“What is this?” asked Dean. “Holy Water?”

I ducked back under his arm and back over to the desk to try and clear some papers out of Sam’s way. He gave me a half smile.

“You really don’t need to do that, Ellie.”

“Can’t help it,” I said. “Don’t mind me, you just keep reading.”

“But the last time we saw you,” Dean was saying, “I mean… you did threaten to blast him full of buckshot. Cocked the shotgun and everything.”

My ears pricked up, hoping to maybe hear what the falling out was. No such luck.

“Yeah, well, what can I say?” asked Dad. “John just has that effect on people.”

“Yeah, I guess he does,” said Dean.

“None of that matters now. All that matters is you get him back.”

That’s my daddy. Comes on like he’s all gruff and no-nonsense, but secretly there ain’t no one as sentimental. He believes in family sticking together, and in love and all kinds of hokey crap.

“This book…” said Sam. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I perched myself on the corner of the desk, trying not to smile. Sam Winchester. Still a big ol nerd. “Key of Solomon? It’s the real deal alright.”

“And these, uh, these protective circles. They really work?”

_Of course they work, Winchester_ , I thought. _Why else did we just spend twenty minutes teaching you to draw them?_ _There’s a demon coming for you boys. And us too, thanks for that, you better believe our protection works._

“Hell yeah!” said Dad, coming over to us. “You get a demon in – they’re trapped. Powerless. It’s like a Satanic roach motel.”

“Man knows his stuff,” said Dean.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. Something made me want to prove to Dean that I knew a thing or two as well. Maybe it was him always lording his age and experience over me as kids. Maybe it was my teenage crush. Maybe I just wanted to feel like four years of college had gone to good use. “This is some serious crap you boys stepped in.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Sam, looking up at me. “How’s that?”

“Normal year, we hear of say, three demonic possessions. Maybe four, tops.”

“Yeah?” asked Dean, looking between me and my father.

“This year we hear of twenty-seven. So far.”

Dad had a proud sort of smile, as he stood beside me. “You get what we’re saying? More and more demons are walking among us – a lot more.”

“Do you know why?” asked Sam.

It’s always something, ain’t it? Not enough that I know more about demons than those two and their daddy combined. Not enough I been keeping track of omens they paid no never mind to. No, they want me to have every answer.

“No,” I said. “But I know it’s something big. The storm’s coming, and you boys, your daddy… You are smack in the middle of it.”

As if he was trying to add an ominous tone to my words, Rumsfeld suddenly started to bark. Dad went over to the window, and looked out. He turned back, his face fairly stony, but I knew him well enough to know when he was scared.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

I jumped as his words were followed by a loud bang. The front door came flying inside. The demon who had kicked it in didn’t wait barely a moment before she strolled in. The girl it was possessing was an interesting choice. Not tiny, but both shorter and skinnier than me. She had blonde hair in a short cut that I didn’t think really suited her. Which was an odd thought to have in that moment, but I’m nothing if not unorthodox.

“No more crap, okay?” she said, looking around at the four of us.

I pulled the knife off my belt. Not that I expected it to be any help, but I was hoping she’d walk into the devil’s trap before that became a problem. Dean went towards her, straight away, unscrewing the holy water flask Dad had given him. Before he had a chance to do anything, she hit him hard enough to send him flying across the room into a pile of books. I couldn’t tell if he was knocked out.

I was the next closest to the demon, but she still hadn’t stepped into the trap. I thought about backing away so she’d follow me, but Sam stepped in between us.

“I want the Colt, Sam,” she said. “The real Colt. Right now.”

Sam started to step back, just as I had planned, and my dad I did the same. He still kept between the two of us and the demon, though. “We don’t have it on us,” he said. “We buried it.”

“Didn’t I say “no more crap”?” the annoyed demon asked. “I swear, after everything I heard about you Winchesters, I got to tell you, I’m a little underwhelmed. First Johnny tries to pawn off a fake gun, and then he leaves the real gun with you two chuckleheads. Lackluster.” She continued on as Sam kept backing us across the room and under the devil’s trap. She followed us, stepping right under it. “I mean, did you really think I wouldn’t find you?”

“Actually, we were counting on it.”

Dean was conscious, and he was standing behind her, on the other side of the devil’s trap. Alarmed, the demon looked up and realised that we had caught her.

Dean smirked. “Gotcha.”


	2. Chapter 2: My First Exorcism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has never seen an exorcism before, and she is changed by the experience, and what happens afterwards.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 1x21.

We couldn’t tell if she was alone, or if there were more waiting outside. Dad grabbed the salt to protect all the other doors. That left the boys and I to tie up the demon. We brought a chair inside the devil’s trap and they held her down while I got the rope around her. The boys called her Meg. They’d already explained their history with her, but they didn’t seem to really know much about her at all.

“I don’t mind being tied up, boys,” she said, as I tightened the knot at her back. “But it’d be more fun just the three of us, don’t you think?”

“Shut up,” Dean warned her, as he and his brother stepped back.

I had the ropes tight enough. She strained at them, but it was obvious to her that she wasn’t getting away. Sam and Dean just stood nearby, watching her. I wasn’t sure what I ought to do. This was about the Winchesters. Their father was captive, not mine. I settled for hoisting myself up onto the table and staring at her back.

My Dad came back in, waving the salt.

“I salted the doors and windows. If there are any demons out there, they ain’t getting in.”

That was obviously what Dean was waiting for. He strode past Sam and stood in front of his bound enemy.

“Where’s our father, Meg?”

She smirked. “You didn’t ask very nice.”

“Where’s our father, bitch?” he said.

Demon Meg was gleeful, even tied up and trapped. “Jeez! You kiss your mother with that mouth? Oh wait, I forgot, you don’t…”

Dean did exactly what she hoped he would, rushing forward. His hands on either side of the chair, he screamed into her face. Sam only watched on, silent.

“You think this is a frigging game?” yelled Dean. “Where is he? What did you do to him?”

“He died screaming,” said Meg. “I killed him myself.”

She was clearly trying to aggravate Dean, hoping to get him angry so he’d lash out and make some kind of mistake she could exploit. I could see that, and I’m sure Dean could probably see it too. It was hard to blame him for rising to it, though. Ain’t nobody likes to be mocked by the enemy.

Dean hit her right in the face, and I winced for the poor girl inside.

“That’s kind of a turn on, you hitting a girl,” she said.

Her refusal to be hurt by his violence irritated Dean still further. Guy was itching to kill something and my guess is, she wanted him to kill her. If we played it right, we could get her to talk, but if she got him mad enough, Dean might just beat her into a coma or find some way to kill her outright.

“You’re no girl!” he shouted.

“Dean…” warned my Dad. He led him into the next room and I followed. Sam came behind me, and we all huddled together.

“You alright?” I asked Dean, putting a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

I wasn’t sure how he would react. I barely knew him, at least as an adult. He didn’t brush me off. He just looked at my hand for a second, like he was surprised I would touch him.

“She’s lying,” he insisted. “He’s not dead.”

I didn’t know. We had no reason to believe Meg and that yellow-eyed son of a bitch she served were keeping John alive. But we didn’t know for sure he was dead, either. Demons lie as easy as breathing. I guess Dean needed to believe his daddy was alive, and I got that. I’d feel the same. Sure, I’d done my fair share of worrying, believing each time was maybe the time my father never came home. But no matter how late he is or how desperate you get for that phone call, you still hold onto hope.

As I gave Dean’s shoulder a squeeze and took my hand back, I wondered how Sam felt. His face was pretty unreadable.

“Dean, you gotta be careful with her,” Dad reminded him. “Don’t hurt her.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because she really is a girl. That’s why,” said Dad. Every time Dean hit her, some poor innocent inside felt it.

“What are you talking about?” asked Sam.

I stared at him. Did he not understand what possession was? “She’s possessed. That’s a human possessed by a demon. Can’t you tell?”

Dean was now the one staring. He looked at me like I’d told him the sky was red. “Are you trying to tell me there’s an innocent girl trapped somewhere in there?”

Of course there was! Where did these boys think demons got a body? Walmart?

“That’s actually good news,” Dean said, staring back through at Meg.

“How is that good news?” I asked. “You beat that demon, you’re beating the poor kid she’s possessing.”

“Cos we can get her out. Bobby, one of these books got an exorcism ritual?”

As Dad ran to the desk to look for one of dozens of books that might work, I leaned against the back of the sofa. I’d seen a thing or three, and Dad had been hunting near on twenty years, but neither of us had ever performed an actual exorcism. Dad saw one once. An elderly priest near Seattle drove a demon out of a little girl. Whole lotta black smoke came rushing out of her mouth like vomit, but up and out the window. Cute little town, that. The postcard he brought back was one of those helicopter shots, showing sweet little white houses with dark slate rooves.

Anyway. There’s a long way between watching an exorcism and doing it yourself.

“You boys ever done exorcism before?” I asked.

“Sammy exorcised a plane,” said Dean. He said it super casual, but you could tell he was pretty proud.

“The plane was possessed?” I asked. There had to be a hell of a story there.

“Sorta,” said Sam. “It… It’s a long story. Never mind. I can do it.”

“Got it!” said Dad, pulling a book out of the pile on the desk. Sam held out his hand and took it from him, beginning to flick through the pages. It wasn’t long before he was ready to perform the ritual and we all marched back to Meg. She was still tied to that chair, though it looked like she made an effort to get out.

“Are you gonna read me a story?” she asked.

Dean’s anger had turned to a kind of smug pleasure. “Something like that. Hit it, Sam.”

Sam’s Latin pronunciation was excellent. I took Latin in college and I could tell he knew what he was doing. It sounded as if he understood the words, not just how to say them.

Meg was trying to hide her alarm behind a smirk. “An exorcism? Are you serious?”

Standing next to Dean, I couldn’t see his face so well, but his body language was kinda scary. Everything I ever hunted was just a job. This here was personal. They were sending a demon back to hell and he was loving it.

“Oh, we’re going for it, babe. Head spinning, projectile vomiting, the whole nine yards.”

We all knew that wouldn’t happen, of course, but his threat made for some good theatre while Sam kept reading the Latin straight from the page. I watched Meg and I don’t mind saying it was kinda fascinating. She flinched from a pain that must have been inside. I wondered if it hurt her victim, too, or if the pain of exorcism was something only the demon could feel.

“I’m gonna kill you!” she warned Dean.

Dean just shrugged like it didn’t matter. Like she wasn’t worth his time. I guess the pain Sam was causing her and Dean’s nonchalance made her desperate. She changed tactic.

“I’ll kill her!” she shouted, shifting her eyes from Dean to me. “I’ll rip the bones from her body!”

I guess she was trying to elicit some kind of angry, protective response out of Dean by threatening me. But he just casually took a step to the side, so he was standing between us.

“No, you’re gonna burn in Hell,” he told her. “Unless you tell us where our Dad is.”

Meg was shaking, whether from pain or some other effect of the exorcism, I couldn’t tell. She still managed to smile at Dean, though. I could see her, though I had to look around him a little, because he still stood in front of me.

“Well, at least you’ll get a nice tan,” he told her.

My Dad must have been concerned about her threatening me. He pulled me backward, to stand with him near the wall. That was irritating. She was tied to a chair, she was about to be exorcised and there was no way she could hurt me. Besides I was just as capable as Sam or Dean of taking care of myself in a fight. It wasn’t worth arguing about, though. I pulled my arm out of my Dad’s grip but I stayed with him, still watching in fascination.

Meg’s shaking became more and more exaggerated until finally she gasped, a great breath of pain coming from her lips and filling up our living room. Sam stopped reading, looking up at her.

“He begged for his life with tears in his eyes. He begged to see his sons one last time. That’s when I slit his throat.”

Sam kept reading, but I was worried. Maybe John really was dead. He was never my favourite person and I knew my father had bad blood with him, but I didn’t want him dead. He was a great hunter and probably a decent enough person. Apart from anything else, I knew his death would hurt at least one of his sons, and I didn’t want them to have that pain.

“For your sake, I hope you’re lying,” Dean warned her. “Cause if it’s true, I swear to God, I will march into Hell myself and I will slaughter each and every one of you evil sons of bitches, so help me God!”

I really believed he would. There was something almost hellish about Dean himself. Had he always been like this? Last time I saw him he was what, eighteen? Did he have this rage, then? This secret stash of bloodlust bubbling within him, waiting for a threat so it could burst out? He was somewhere between angry and crazy and I didn’t know where the line was.

“Where is he!?” he demanded, as Meg writhed and shook.

“You just won’t take dead for an answer, will you?” she sneered.

Dean just yelled at her again, his agitation rising still further. I wanted to step towards him, to put a hand on his shoulder again, try to calm him. But I looked at my father and he must have seen something in my face, cos he shook his head.

“Where is he!?”

“DEAD!”

“No he’s not!”

It broke my heart a little, to hear the desperation in Dean’s voice. Not because of any particular feeling I had for him. I was well over that teenage crush. It was more that he was in such deep pain and I could feel it emanating off him. I couldn’t help thinking how I would feel if my own daddy had been taken by demons with a grudge. He was shouting and trying to cover his fear and uncertainty with rage, but I sensed it and I wished I could help him. But what could I do?

“He’s not dead! He can’t be! What are you looking at?!” he asked Sam, who had stopped reading for a moment, and stared at him with concern. My expression must have been somewhat similar to his: a little worry, a little sympathy, a little fear. “Keep reading!”

Sam did as his brother told him, carrying on the exorcism. Though I was still near the wall, safe as I could reasonably be, I jumped back as the chair started to slide. It stayed within the trap, but it dragged across the floor of its own accord. Meg was not pulling it. Seeing that he was getting a result, Sam’s confidence increased. I could hear it in his voice.

“He will be!” Meg screamed.

It took me a moment to figure out what she meant. Did she mean John? He isn’t dead but he will be?

“Wait! What?” I asked.

“He’s not dead,” she admitted. “But he will be after what we do to him.”

Sam had stopped reading and stepped closer to her, a glance passing between the brothers.

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” asked Dean.

“You don’t!”

Still angry, still afraid, Dean called for Sam to keep going but before he could get the next word of the ritual out, she caved.

“A building! Okay! A building in Jefferson City.”

“Missouri?” asked Dean. I could hear the renewed sound of hope in his voice and I prayed Meg wasn’t screwing with him. “Where? Where? An address!”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“And the demon?” Sam said. “The one we’re looking for. Where is it?”

She insisted that she did not know, that she had told them everything. I didn’t know what Sam and Dean thought, but I sure as Hell didn’t believe her. She was some kind of right hand woman for the demon with the yellow eyes. Ain’t no way she didn’t know more.

“Finish it,” Dean told Sam.

Meg was outraged. “What? I told you the truth!”

Dean shrugged. Shrugging suited him so well. His whole personality just seemed to be shrugging all the time. “I don’t care.”

“You son of a bitch, you promised!”

I laughed out loud, and my father, the Winchesters and even Meg all turned to look at me. I gave a casual shrug of my own. The gall of it!

“I lied,” said Dean. “Sam…”

Sam looked conflicted about it. What was there to decide? If you can get a demon out of someone, you get ‘em out.

“Sam! Read.”

Although Dean was right, I had to wonder if he ordered Sam around that way all the time. He was almost a parent when they were kids, but the age gap didn’t mean the same thing now. He had no business giving commands like his brother was a soldier or a disobedient kid.

I was a few steps away, so I didn’t hear what Sam whispered to Dean. Coming away from the wall, and my father, I hurried over to them.

“She doesn’t know,” Dean was saying.

“She lied,” was Sam’s response.

It sounded like Sam wanted to keep questioning the demon, find out what else she knew about their father and her boss. He wasn’t wrong. She had definitely lied. But she might never tell the truth, and we couldn’t keep her indefinitely.

“Sam, she’s possessing some innocent woman,” I told him. He looked from Dean to me. “We have to help.”

“You’re gonna kill her.”

My father had come up behind us, and we all turned to him. “What?” asked Dean.

“You said she fell from a building. That girl’s body is broken. Only thing keeping her alive is that demon inside. You exorcise it, that girl’s going to die.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Apparently, neither had Dean. He looked at me and I looked at him, but I could see we both felt the same. Dead or not, that girl was better off without the demon. She was in pain every second that damn thing was inside her. At least death was final.

“We can’t leave her like this,” I said.

“Ellie, she’s a human being,” Dad insisted.

But Dean had decided. “And we’re gonna put her out of her misery. Sam finish it.”

Sam looked at his brother and at Dad and at me. Then at Dean again. He was obviously torn. He looked up at Meg, and I saw his uncertainty. The little boy I remembered was compassionate and kind. Our arguments must have appealed to that side of him, but there was something else in him that made him hesitate. Fear for his father, maybe.

He held the book up, his hands on either side of it. I put my hands over his and he looked away from Meg and into my face.

“Please finish it, Sam.”

Maybe it was my hands on his that made him decide. Maybe it was something he saw in my eyes. Maybe he thought I’d just take the book and do it myself. Whatever it was, Sam took a deep, slow breath and kept reading aloud.

It only took two or three more sentences before Meg convulsed. Her head fell back and a deep, unnatural scream escaped from her. It was just like Dad had described in Washington, a writhing black cloud was forced out of her mouth. It spread across the ceiling before it disappeared entirely. The girl, Meg, or whatever her real name was, slumped forward. There was blood dripping from her mouth and her eyes rolled back. Like she had just fallen from that building.

I thought she was dead instantly, but she started to lift her head. She was holding on, brave girl. Realising she was still tied to the chair, I rushed forward to help her. Sam was only a step behind me.

“She’s still alive. Call 911! Get some water and blankets!”

Dad ran off to get the phone, so I left the boys to look after her and ran to grab the water and the blankets. The blanket was easy enough to grab from the back of my favourite chair, but I had to reach up to the cupboard for a glass, and fill it from the sink while my hand still shook furiously. There was no way she’d survive this, surely?

I ran back in to where Sam and Dean had laid the girl down on the floor. I handed the glass to Dean and got Sam to help me get the blanket over her. I wanted to tuck it under her, get her warm as possible to protect her from the shock, but I was so afraid to touch her. It looked as though every bone in her body was broken. The pain must have been excrutiating.

“Where is the demon we’re looking for?” asked Sam, after she’d taken a few sips of water.

I didn’t think it was the right time to ask. The poor girl deserved peace in her last moments. But maybe she had offered her help while I was out of the room.

“Not there,” she told Sam. “Other ones. Awful ones.”

“Where are they keeping our Dad?” asked Dean.

“By the river,” she said. “Sunrise.”

“Sunrise?” Dean repeated. “What does that mean? What does that mean?”

But it was useless to ask. It had been her last word. Sunrise.

I didn’t even know the girl, but I admired her so much. Even in her last moments, lying broken and bloodied from a months-old fall, she fought for as long as she could. She tried to help Dean and Sam find their daddy. I could take out a nest of fangs, or go a few rounds with a vengeful spirit. But this was a different kind of courage. I hoped the boys appreciated it, but even if they didn’t, I always would. It gave me something to aspire to. To fight to the end, to go out doing good, even if I’d never see the benefit of it.  I’d always looked up to my daddy and to people like Dean. But there was other kinds of strength in the world, and they was valuable too.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3: Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sam and Dean come back with news of their father’s death, Ellie tries to help them cope with what happened. One brother is more receptive.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during Episodes 2x01 and 2x02

With the paramedics on their way, the Winchester boys had to haul ass. Dad said he’d make up some story about Meg. I never did know what it was, or how he explained the devil’s trap. I walked Sam and Dean to their car and showed them the back way out of the yard so they wouldn’t pass the ambulance. They each hugged me before getting in the car and then I watched them drive off. Didn’t figure I’d be seeing them again for a long while.

I shouldn’t have gone looking for Rumsfeld, but I did. That old mutt had been my best friend for well over half my life. Sure he was getting on in years, but he was still spry. He had plenty more morning jogs in him. I don’t wanna talk about what I found or the way I cried when I found it. I only vaguely heard the sounds of the paramedics leaving with that poor girl’s body. Dad came out and found me, bawling over Rumsfeld’s remains. We buried him in the yard. I ain’t embarrassed. There’s no shame in grieving for a friend.

Sheriff Mills had to question Dad, but he lied and said I hadn’t been home. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit there and tell some story about Meg and how she’d shown up at our place battered and bruised. I don’t even know why. I seen death and pain plenty of times and a lot of it my own handiwork. But I never seen anything like that poor girl, forced to keep living with a broken body, locked in her mind, not even able to scream.

I wish I could say it was all worth it, that everything went well. The boys rescued their daddy, sure enough. But he didn’t live another week. Next night, all three of them was in a car accident. Hit by a truck. Driver said he didn’t remember a thing, so stands to reason he was possessed when it happened. That beautiful Impala was totalled, but that ain’t the worst of it. I answered the phone when Sam called, begging for my father to come to Missouri. Dean was dying.

Dad went down right away, to tow back what was left of the car and… just to be there, I guess. I was left on my own, without even Rumsfeld to keep me company. Damn, that house was sparkling like a diamond by the time Dad got back. He said it wasn’t looking good for Dean. I ain’t religious or nothing, but I said a sorta prayer to myself up in my room.

We figured Sam and John would come collect the car some day, but there wasn’t no rush. People can linger in comas for a long time.

I was reading when they finally came. Must have been two days, maybe three. I was still reeling from everything that happened with Meg, and poor Rumsfeld. And now I was expecting to hear any day that Dean had passed. So I was reading some novel or other. Trash, an easy escape. I didn’t want to have to think about how much loss there’d been. I didn’t want to think about that poor girl’s family, never knowing what happened to her. Or about how quiet it was without Rumsfeld growling as he chased rabbits in his sleep. The way his legs used to twitch like he was running. I didn’t want to think about Sam Winchester, losing the big brother he’d always looked up to. I just wanted to read about martians that ate people and wore their faces.

When Dad called me downstairs, it took me a minute to find a bookmark, and get my ass off the bed and into gear. Figuring he just wanted me to go to the store or something, I didn’t exactly hurry down the stairs. I heard voices. Male voices, both familiar, but neither of them Dad’s.

I saw Dean first. He was standing by the door, turned slightly away from me, but I recognised him right away. Without noticing anything else about him, I flew down the last six steps, and straight across the hall, to grip him in an awkward and probably over-familiar hug. He stumbled, caught off guard, but straightened himself up and squeezed back.

I could feel tears in my eyes as I clung onto him.

“I thought… Dad said…”

I felt his hand in my hair for a moment, before he pulled out of the hug, and I remembered I barely even knew him anymore.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just… I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks, kid,” he said, with only half a smile.

I got a hug from Sam too, but I was looking at Dean the whole time. He had a cut on his head, but it was starting to heal up already. He stood up straight and tall and he didn’t look like he was in any pain at all. Sam was more bruised than he was. He didn’t look like a man who’d been in a coma.

“What’s wrong?” asked Sam, as he let me go.

“He don’t even look sore,” I whispered. “What kind of coma has you walkin’ round right after?”

Sam frowned. “Yeah… about that…”

John was dead. That weren’t right. Nothing was right about the whole thing. Dean had spent a couple days comatose and the doctors told John and Sam there wasn’t much hope. Then John gives Sam a list of stuff he needs my Dad to get for him. Claiming it’s for some protection spell since Dean’s so vulnerable. Stuff like Oil of Abramelin and that ain’t no protection. It was obvious he was planning on summoning a demon.

Next thing they know, Dean wakes up all of a sudden, right as rain, John starts getting oddly sentimental and Bam! He drops dead. It don’t take a genius to guess John did some kinda deal. Traded his life for his son’s. Nothing else makes sense.

Dad told the boys to stay a few weeks. They needed time to recuperate, fix their car. And to grieve, but he knew better than to say that. We put Dean in the spare room, and Sam’s an early riser, so he took the couch.

That’s how it was for near a week. Dean spent hour after hour working on that car, staying under it until it got so dark he couldn’t see anymore. It got so I had to take him out beers just to get him to take fluids in. He’d always say thanks, but not much more. He offered to cook twice, but wouldn’t let me help him. Dad and I got booted out of our own kitchen. I can’t even imagine losing my daddy, but to know he traded his life for yours… That’s gotta mess your head up.

Sam was a little better. He spent a lot of time looking through the books, catching up on a little light occult reading. His head was in that hunting journal of his daddy’s nearly 24/7. He ate and drank of his own accord and could even hold a conversation. We had time to catch up properly. We talked about college. He had a free ride to Stanford and John disowned him for it. What do you even say when someone tells you that? My dad was thrilled I got into college at all. He was pre-law. Made my linguistics major look pretty weak, but Sam was polite enough not to say it. We can’t all be geniuses, and Wisconsin is a good school, I don’t care what anyone says. Don’t know how hunting’s gonna pay off my student loans, though. I was pretty jealous of that scholarship, I gotta tell ya.

He told me about a girlfriend the yellow-eyed demon killed, and though it was a year ago, I could tell he still thought about her all the time. He’d ended giving up on law school and getting back into the life. That’s what happens. It’ll suck you back in every darn time. Hunters can’t quit.

Maybe a week in, Sam came upstairs looking for me. I was in my room, just emailing my friend Jo. He knocked on the door frame and I looked up, closing up my laptop out of habit. Used to do that as a teen. Didn’t want my dad to see my IMs.

“Hey,” he said.

I smiled. His toes were perfectly in line with the door frame and his hand stopped short of reaching around the edge. “It’s okay, Sam. You can come in.”

“I don’t know, Ellie. Your Dad has guns.”

“We’ll keep the door open,” I said, gesturing to the bed. “And leave room for Jesus.”

Sam always smiled with his whole face. He had adorable little dimples and his eyes sparkled. Outrageously good genes, those Winchesters. Kinda annoying, really.

“You still collect postcards,” he said, lowering himself a fair distance to sit on my bed.

“Yep.”

My postcards covered every wall of my room. At first, I just had a little space for them, then a whole wall and by that time, they pretty much took over every surface. Around the mirror, on the wardrobe doors, inside and out. Even a couple on the ceiling above the bed.

“Bobby still bring you new ones?” he asked.

I nodded. “Some I bring home myself. But not enough. I want to go everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” asked Sam.

“I’ve got cards from all over the lower 48, but I ain’t been further than Cincinnati. Or Wichita, I guess. Had a hunt in Idaho last year.”

Sam leaned back to see the postcards on the ceiling. They were mostly just blurry blobs of colour at that distance, but they were still something pretty to look at.

“So why don’t you?” he asked.

“Go everywhere? I dunno.”

I totally knew. Because of my Dad. He needed me. Even during college I’d be back every month or so, drive all night on a Friday and be there for the weekend. It wasn’t that he needed me to do anything in particular. He never said anything, and if I missed a visit back then, he never complained. But I knew. He missed me when I was away or he was. He never used to hunt during summer holidays. It was one thing to go away a few days when I was at school anyway, but summers were for me. He taught me to shoot and to fight. He taught me how to drive and how to take a car apart. He didn’t just do that to protect me, or teach me a skill for life. He wanted to spend that time with me, cos I was all he had.

Sam was now watching me as I put my feet up on the bed. I got first class posture, always sitting on tables, or slouching at my desk. When I was sixteen and freaking out about the size of my ass, Dad told me I was “built for comfort”. I live for comfort. Always gotta have a place to park my ass and put up my feet.

“This room has barely changed,” said Sam. “Little less pink, lot more postcards, but… uh… it’s pretty much the same room we used to hang out in. On the floor, drawing with crayons.”

I hadn’t remembered until he said it. It wasn’t that John objected particularly to his son getting arty. But they were on the road a lot, and there was only so much you could fit in a car. I had a bucket of crayons the size of my head, and Sam always wanted to use them. We’d spread across the hard wooden boards of the bedroom floor, drawing whatever popped into our heads. I went through a fairies and butterflies phase and Sam was all about dogs. He drew green ones and brown ones and big ones with floppy ears and little ones with waggy tails.

Remembering that made me think of Rumsfeld and I frowned. But then I remembered I wasn’t the only one hurting.

“How you doing, anyway?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep thinking about all the times we fought, how often I just wanted him out of my life. I hated him half the time. Do I even have a right to be upset?”

“Of course you do,” I assured him. “You’re not supposed to just love your family and that’s that. Emotions are more complicated than that.”

“I spent so long pushing him out. And there’s a part of me that… It could have been Dean, you know? It doesn’t feel right. I’m so wrong for feeling this way.”

Sam was normally pretty articulate, but I had to read between the lines a little. I never had a brother, or any family at all really, except my daddy. We always got along great. Even when I was bratty and he was crotchety. Since the day my mamma died it’d just been him and me, Team Singer. It sounded like Sam had mixed and confused feelings about his father. And on top of that, John’s death was obviously a trade-off for Dean’s. Sam couldn’t be entirely sorry his father was dead, because it had meant his brother lived. I got why he’d feel guilty about that.

But feelings are feelings and we can’t help them.

“I don’t think anything you feel is ever wrong, Sam. You can do the wrong thing or say it, but feelings just are what they are. Best thing you can do is let yourself feel, and be supportive of Dean. Do whatever he needs.”

“I don’t know what he needs,” Sam sighed. “He won’t talk about it. About anything.”

The Impala was outside in the yard. I could see it out the window, and sometimes I could see Dean, working furiously at that car so he didn’t have to think or feel. I grabbed Sam’s arm and pulled him up and towards the window.

“I been watching him a lot,” I said, pointing down at the heavy boots and denim-clad calves sticking out from under the black car.

“I know,” Sam said. “You bring him beer or a sandwich. Thanks.”

“Sometimes he talks about the car,” I told him. “But never about your dad. But, you know… you guys aren’t the same. Never were. If he wants to talk about it, you’ll know.”

“I feel like he should at least be angry or something. I’m angry,” said Sam. “So angry. I’m reading that damn journal all day, trying to find something we can go on. Anything. I just want to get back out there and hunt this thing, not sit around waiting for Dean to fix his car!”

His breath had gotten heavier as he became agitated. I put a hand on his shoulder and I could feel the tension in his muscles.

“Maybe you and me should go on a hunt,” I said. “Find something to kill.”

Sam turned away from the window and looked at me. He smiled. “Pretty sure your dad would kill me.”

I laughed. Probably. Dad was happy for me to go off hunting on my own, but with a boy? Horror of horrors!

“So there’s nothing in your dad’s journal?” I asked, throwing myself back down on the bed.

“Nothing,” he said again. “Whatever he knew about Yellow Eyes, he didn’t write it down.”

If John had new information about this demon, he had to be getting that information  _from_ somebody. He might have been asking the right questions in the right places, but he wasn’t a patient man. I didn’t picture him sitting around doing hour after hour of research the way Sam or I did. More likely, he’d have someone do the work for him while he went out and hunted something.

So… how would that person get the information to him?

“Have you tried his cell phone?” I asked.

“What?”

“His cell phone,” I repeated. “He had one. Who were his contacts? He have any voicemails saved?”

Sam smiled, whole face thrown into it, yet again.

“Ellie, you’re a genius.”

* * *

Sam took about a day to crack his father’s voicemail code. There was a message there from Aunt Ellen. Apparently she’d called John months earlier, urging him to call back. Sam and Dean didn’t know who Ellen was, but I could fill them in well enough. Aunt Ellen wasn’t my real aunt. But she acted like she was. Ellen had a roadhouse down in Nebraska. I didn’t know what her history was with John. Dad said it wasn’t great, but when did Johnny Winchester ever leave a good impression? Still, if she said she knew something, she knew something. She wouldn’t call John for nothing.

Hunters from all over came to the roadhouse. Dad started taking me when I was still pretty young. When he took me camping anywhere down that way, we always stopped by Harvelle’s. Some people would question taking a little girl to that kind of place, but it was a great time. Ellen had a daughter, few years younger than me, and we played together. Jo was way cooler than any of the other girls at my school. She played Hunter with me, and we’d go tracking imaginary vampires all over the building, getting in everybody’s way. Can you picture it? Her blonde pigtails and my grubby brown braid, empty water pistols at the ready and a plastic safety knife each for cutting off heads.

I used to have this fantasy that my Dad and Ellen would get married and we would all be a big family. Jo would be my sister, and we’d do sister things together. I didn’t know for sure what sister things were, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with baking cookies and going shopping and having the perfect bridesmaid for your wedding. I asked my father if he’d ever marry Aunt Ellen so we could be a family and he said he didn’t have to marry someone for them to count as my family. I could pick anyone I liked to be family, and Jo and I could be sisters if we wanted to. We wanted to.

Jo and I still emailed all the time, and I still stopped by the roadhouse if I was nearby. I thought about going down to see them with the boys, but thought better of it. Maybe a few days together would do them some good, give them a chance to talk it through, or yell at one another, or do whatever they needed to do. Plus, Jo said Ash was still living there and I was avoiding him. That’s a long story. Totally dull. Anyway, I told Sam to give my love to Jo and Aunt Ellen. Dean didn’t seem like the guy to carry that kind of message. He was pretty irritated before they even left. The squeaky old minivan I found for them to drive was cramping his style.

I waved them off, wincing at the sound that damn van made. It was at least a five hour drive to Aunt Ellen. Maybe they would take that time to talk about what they were going through. But, I thought, probably not.


	4. Chapter 4: A Good Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie wants to help the grieving Sam and Dean, so she hits upon a way they can all blow off some steam.
> 
> This Chapter takes place between Episodes 2x02 and 2x03.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t want this story to just focus on Ellie interacting with Sam and Dean. It was fun thinking about what Bobby might be like as a father. I think he’d be pretty ace at it.

Sitting in my desk chair, I could see out the window into the yard. Dean was working on the car, while Sam paced a little, without speaking to him. It looked like he had something he wanted to say, but he wasn’t saying it.

The boys had come back from the roadhouse, having argued a little and fought a rakshasa disguised as a clown. You know, like anyone does, to pass the time. Ash had taken a look at their dad’s research and written a computer program to monitor the omens surrounding the yellow-eyed demon. Now Dean was back at work on that car again, and Sam lingered nearby.

I was about to turn back to my computer when Sam stopped pacing and I realised he was talking to Dean. He seemed to speak for a minute or so, and before Dean made any kind of answer, Sam turned away and walked back towards the house and out of my sight. I watched Dean for a moment, still and silent. Without warning, he reached for a crowbar and smashed it straight into a car nearby. I couldn’t hear it with the window closed, but the sight gave me enough of a jolt. It had happened so suddenly.

I stood up and looked out the window, as Dean began smashing into his own car, slamming the crowbar against the trunk again and again. I put my hands on the window frame, considering. Should I open it and call out to him? Go downstairs and try to calm him? Find Sam and ask what he had said? Or just leave him be?

Before I could decide, there was a knock. I turned to look, but remembered my door was closed.

“Who is it?”

“It’s just me,” called Dad’s deep, gruff voice. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I called, turning back to the window. Dean had thrown down the crowbar and was now staring off in the direction Sam had walked.

My Dad came in, leaving the door open behind him. “He still out there?” he asked, seeing where I was looking.

I sighed and came away from the window. I sat down on my bed, heavy enough to make the wooden slats creak. I grabbed a pillow and clutched it to my chest. It was kind of a substitute for Dean. I wanted to hug him until he felt better, but he would never let me, so I squeezed the pillow instead, hoping it would make me feel better.

“I wish I could help,” I said. “But I don’t know how.”

“You can’t help someone who don’t wanna let ya,” said Dad, gazing out the window.

He was right. In any case, sometimes there ain’t no way to help. There are some things that only time can make better, and their daddy had only been dead a fortnight. They weren’t just going to get over that right away.

With a sigh, my father sat down at the head of my bed, moving a pillow out of his way. Still squeezing the other pillow, I leaned into him and he put both arms around me, in a sort of side-on hug.

“You’re a sweet kid,” he said. “Always wanting everyone happy. I’m proud of ya.”

My head resting on his shoulder, I let him hold me like I was still a little girl. He’s so gruff and cranky, my daddy, that a lot of people are surprised when he shows physical affection. But he ain’t ever been cold with people he cares about. He always has a swift, manly sorta hug for an old friend and maybe a kiss on the cheek if it’s a woman. With me he’s always been affectionate. I might have been going on twenty-four, but I was still his baby girl, and if I needed a hug, I got one.

“Maybe I should take them out,” I said, out loud, but mostly to myself. Once I said it aloud, the idea kind of appealed. “Go into town, buy them a drink. Let them blow off steam.”

Dad let me go and turned my head to look at me. “Ellie, tell me you ain’t got feelings for Dean still…”

That only made me laugh. He was a good looking guy… A _great_ looking guy, and maybe I wouldn’t have said no if it came to it. But I certainly didn’t have the same tingly blushing crush feelings for Dean anymore.

“No, Dad,” I said.

I could see him let our a rush of breath as he felt the relief. I couldn’t resist teasing him.

“Sam, on the other hand…”

He was trying to frown sternly, but the hint of a smile was in the corners of his mouth and in his eyes. “Don’t you tease your daddy.”

Dad was a loving and protective father, but he was a realist. He was perfectly aware that a daughter who’s been to college and back is likely to be a sexual being. He was grudgingly nice to my date for Senior Prom, and never bothered me about where I spent the night, once I was eighteen. When he gave me The Talk, after I told him about my crush on Dean, he was nervous and a little awkward, but understanding. He said it was okay to ask questions, and we didn’t do the safe sex talk at thirteen, but he was prepared to have it when I was ready for it. And when we did have that talk, he said he’d prefer me to wait until eighteen, but either way, he gave me the information I needed to be safe.

Now I was well and truly adult, he had a strict policy of not asking and I repaid that by not bringing home random guys to make him uncomfortable. It was an arrangement that worked for us both. But while he was comfortable enough with me being a grown women with grown feelings and needs, Hunters are a different story. There’s a stereotype about male Hunters and it wasn’t unwarranted. I’d seen plenty of them, love you and leave you types. And that was fine because sometimes that’s what I wanted too and so we’d go to some cheap motel room and we’d both know what it was and no harm no foul.

So, Dad having concerns about me having a crush on another Hunter was not about trying to keep his sweet virginal daughter out of vice and sin. He was more concerned about a broken heart. And with that concern lingering, having the Winchester brothers wine and dine me was a nightmare scenario.

“Seriously, though,” I said. “A night out’ll do them good. We’ll drink, we’ll eat greasy food, I’ll talk them both up for the ladies. And I could use a few drinks, too.”

“Well, you’re a big girl, you know what you’re doing.”

“Always,” I assured him, giving him a kiss on the cheek that he pretended not to appreciate.

* * *

 

I only had to ask Dean to come out with me once and as soon as he was in, Sam was in. Sioux Falls ain’t a small town and it had plenty of bars and plenty of drinkers. I took them to my favourite, a pretty large and anonymous kind of dive. It didn’t even have a name. The owner was an older man from the same mould as my father, called Gerry. We just called it Gerry’s. It had a neon sign that said “BAR”, often busted and fizzling. There was an old fashioned juke-box and old fashioned darkness. Couple of dartboards, pool tables, and pretty much a guarantee of a sticky floor.

It was a good place. You could go as a group and hang out at a table, or drink alone at the bar in confidence that no one would bother you. There were some sleazy guys, like anywhere, but all the regulars knew not to start up with me. There was shitty food, adequate drinks and occasionally, a real good fight.

Amy behind the bar waved to me as I came in, and lifted an eyebrow when she saw my company. I told the boys I’d buy the first round and left them to grab a booth while I went over to the bar.

“Damn, honey! You can’t be hoarding eye candy like this,” she said, not nearly quietly enough. “That tall one alone… there’s enough o’ him for two!”

I laughed and leant forward onto the bar, trying to suggest an appropriate volume to her. “Old friends of the family,” I said. “Not on my radar. But they’re both single.”

“Mmm hmm,” she muttered. “Put in a word for me with the little one.”

I laughed. Little? Dean was at least six foot. Poor guy, always hanging around with his giant brother made him look small by comparison.

“Get me three beers and I’ll start liquoring him up,” I promised.

She popped three bottles for me and took my cash to the till. I gathered the bottles together to get them over to Sam and Dean, who were looking around, appraising the bar.

They were sitting on opposite sides of the booth, and I slid in next to Dean, since his side had a better view of the other patrons. I might have been a wing-woman but that didn’t mean I couldn’t scope out a little something for myself.

“This is my regular, so don’t you two be hustling pool,” I warned them.

Dean grinned as if he’d been considering just that, but Sam only looked down at his beer. I nudged Dean. “You’re already in with the bartender,” I told him.

There were three bartenders on, but only two of them were women. “Boobs or blondie?” he asked.

Sam looked up. “Dude!”

I’m not wild about identifying women based on their chest, but I knew Amy was quite proud of her ample bosom.

“Boobs,” I said.

Dean seemed pretty happy with this, and declared that the next round was on him. I started into my beer, hoping that this night might turn out to be therapeutic for at least one Winchester.

An hour later and Dean was chatting up Amy (as if he needed to bother) while Sam and I stayed on opposite sides of the booth. I had my back against the wall, legs running along the length of the tatty faux velvet bench. Sam was picking at the label of his empty bottle.

“So, you think Dean’s going home with Amy?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe.”

“You want another beer?”

He shrugged again. “You having one?”

I sighed. “Maybe.”

Sam was not finding a night on the town as refreshing as Dean was. Not that Dean was suddenly cured, or anything. Grief don’t go away after a few beers and some flirtation with a bartender. But it ain’t good for anyone to just sit and stew in their feelings. Smashing your car with a crowbar and taking a night off were good ways to release some of the pain inside.

“Wanna play a game of pool?” I asked.

Sam thought about this for a moment, before nodding. “Yeah. Okay.”

I gave an encouraging wink as we passed Dean and Amy. It was for both of them, and they both saw it. Dean winked back, with a somewhat suggestive nod of his head towards his brother’s back. I screwed up my face and shook my head, which made them both laugh before turning back to talk to one another.

I made Sam break, standing off to the side and leaning on my cue a little. Gerry probably wouldn’t thank me for it, but he was hardly in a position to be precious about the bar’s property. One of the pockets on the pool table had been replaced with netting from an orange bag.

Sam sunk the five on his break, which horrified me, but he was set up pretty awkward after that, and just missed sinking another ball on his second shot. I had him pass me the chalk while I examined the table.

“You any good at this?” he asked, as I started lining up my shot.

I shrugged, as I got low and squinted down the cue. He took a step back, and I sent the cue ball straight into the nine and twelve. As they both fell into separate pockets, I swear I could hear him smile.

I stood up. “Eh. I’m okay.”

* * *

 

When there were only six balls left at the table, Dean came over, with a beer for each of us. Sam was carefully considering which of his four to target, and he took the beer from Dean’s hand without even looking.

“Dude! She’s kicking your ass!”

After taking a sip of his beer, Sam just smiled and handed the bottle back to his brother. Dean and I leant back against the wall as he took his shot. He sunk one of his balls, sinking another two in the next shot. That left us even. One ball each and the eight-ball left.

“Oh come on!” I cried, as the three and the eight fell into a back corner pocket one after another with a thock-thock.

Dean’s grin stretched even wider. “Ellie, you got hustled.”

“Glad I didn’t put any money down,” I sighed.

Sam came back to the wall to get his beer, taking another sip with a pretty smug expression. I just smiled. It may have been annoying, but at least he was feeling something other than anger and pain.

* * *

 

My Dad had to come pick us up. Or at least, Sam and I, anyway. Dean had long since disappeared, round about the same time Amy went off shift, so we wrote him off. We’d taken my car, but I was in no condition to drive and Sam was worse. I was sober enough to know I couldn’t drive and the cost of a taxi back out to the yard was ridiculous. Calling my father seemed like the smartest thing to do.

We waited on the kerb, both of us leaning against the wall of the bar as we listened for the sound of Dad’s truck.

“How many bugs?” I asked.

“Hundreds of ‘em,” Sam said. “Bugs. Everywhere. So many bugs. Bugs are not cool, Ellie. They’re not cool.”

“Yeah, I got into hunting for the ghosts and the vampires. I ain’t up for no plague of locusts.”

“S’right,” slurred Sam. “No biblical shit.”

“S’right,” I agreed, as he started to fall down the wall and drift into me. “Whoa, there!”

Fortunately, my Dad pulled up, and I was able to drag Sam over to the truck and help him climb into the back. I shut the door on him and hoisted myself up into the front passenger seat.

“You kids had a good night, then, huh?” asked Dad.

“Bobby…” murmured Sam. “Bobby… Thanks for getting us. I’m sorta drunk.”

“No shit,” Dad muttered.

“I’m sorry,” Sam went on. “Ellie’s drunk too. I got her drunk.”

Dad laughed. “She don’t need your help, son. I’m sure she did just fine on her own.”

“You had a good time, right?” I asked, turning and looking over my seat at Sam.

He had not put on his seatbelt, and was slumped in his seat, running one of his large hands through his hair. “You’re nice, Ellie.”

“Thanks, Sam. You’re nice too.”

He just waved a hand vaguely and forcefully in my direction, which was probably supposed to indicate that he was not nice and I was wrong to say so.

“Do I wanna ask what happened to your brother?” asked Dad.

I tried to put a finger to my lips, but I missed on the first try and it ended up on my cheek. I readjusted. “Shhh,” I said. “It’s a secret.”

“We didn’t see anything,” Sam said, shaking his head vigorously. “Because it’s a secret.”

“Sure it is, ya pair of lushes.”


	5. Chapter 5: Mandroids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While working a case in Milwaukee, Ellie runs into the Winchesters, leading to an argument with Dean.
> 
> This Chapter Takes Place During Episode 2x12

_Hi Jo,_

_I don’t even know what to say about your last email.  I was a little shocked at first, but I guess I’m not that surprised, if I really think about it. I don’t know what to think about John Winchester. Even when I was a kid I never warmed to him. To be honest, I think the only reason he was welcome round here was cos Dad cared about the boys._

_I get why Aunt Ellen is so mad, but I think she should cut you a break. After all, you didn’t know about John and your dad. You want me to call and talk to her? Or Dad? If you really want to keep hunting, maybe I could take you out? Think that’d go down better than the Winchesters?_

_But hey, you wanted to know what was new with me. Well, not a lot. I took out a poltergeist in Saint Cloud last week. It had latched onto a pair of twins and this thing was crazy vicious. Sometimes I feel like I should specialise in that kind of shit. Poltergeists just seem to find me. Dad says I got a way with kids and I do love them. These two were adorable, though. Little boy and a girl, five years old. It’s amazing what kids can cope with, you know. They were terrified, but they took everything that bastard threw at them and when I asked them questions they were so matter-of-fact about it all. Maybe they haven’t reached that age yet when they don’t trust their own experiences. I don’t know. Anyway, they were real sweet, and I stuck the pictures they drew of me on the dash of my car. She drew me with wings, cos she said I was like a fairy godmother. I just about died._

_It’s still funny to me you ask about my love life every time you write! What are you expecting to happen, a knight in shining armour to come sweep me up? I know it ain’t even you asking. But you can tell Ash I got nothing to report and even if I did, I wouldn’t. Not to him. And not to you, cos I know you can’t help but tell!_

_Dad says hi. Write soon and let me know how it’s going with the whole “no hunting under my roof” issue._

_Ellie_

* * *

I straightened my suit jacket before knocking on the door with all the confidence and authority of a real FBI agent. FBI was one of my least favourite cover stories. I have a lot of thick hair and to look the part, I needed a half can of hairspray. Then there was the tailored clothes. I’m a tanktop and jeans kinda girl. The button up shirts and pencil skirts are uncomfortable and I was always sure they looked ridiculous. I had way too much ass and not nearly enough boob. Then there was the make-up. When I tried it in High School, some of the other girls gave me Hell for it. I mean, they were the kind of girls who’d always find something to pick on… It was my acne, and then when I tried to cover that with make-up it was the make-up. Anyway, I had a bad relationship with my face, and the foundation and tidy eyeliner of an FBI cover always brought that back to the front of my mind.

I was hit in the face by a bright light, and I blinked in shock and brought my hand up to shield my eyes. The inner door opened, and a suspicious face stared at me through the glass. Somewhat overweight and with long curly hair, Ronald Resnick was not quite what I had pictured. According to the police report, he was a security guard at Milwaukee National Trust, and he’d been beaten unconscious during a robbery. It was supposedly an inside job, but it was one of several in which a loyal employee had robbed a business, gone home and committed suicide, with police finding no trace of the stolen money or goods.

I had no idea what I could be dealing with. But it sounded like it might be my kind of thing. Possession was my theory, although it seemed odd for a demon to be stealing money or jewellery.

“What do you want?” the man asked.

“Are you Mr. Resnick?” I asked.

“Might be.”

“My name is Agent Elenore Jones, I’m with the FBI…”

“You got a badge?” he asked.

I took out my badge and pressed it against the glass. He examined it very carefully, but I kept a stern, blank expression. Ain’t no way he’d know it was fake. That thing had fooled real FBI agents before.

“The police have my statement,” he said, apparently satisfied I was genuine.

His demeanour suggested a man who was pretty paranoid. Some people are just like that, but he may really have seen something weird the night of the robbery. Either way, he probably was used to being dismissed and disbelieved.

“I read it, Mr. Resnick. There are some points I’d like you to elaborate on. May I come in so we can talk privately?”

“You… you wanna hear my story?”

“I do. I think you might be able to break this case wide open.”

He scrutinised me through the door, before opening it a crack.

“Come in, quick,” he said.

I pulled open his door a little wider and squeezed through. He looked out again before closing the door and bolting it.

Ronald’s living room was interesting. The pictures on his wall were not of family and friends, unless his loved ones were blurry UFOs or newspaper clippings stuck to cardboard. Science fiction and weird conspiracy magazines littered his coffee table.

“See, I told the cops everything, but they just thought I was crazy. Wrote me off.”

“Well, I like to get all the details, Mr Resnick.”

“Juan was my friend. He never robbed the place, okay? I know it. I mean, it looked like Juan and it sounded like Juan, but it wasn’t Juan. I know it wasn’t.”

This was sounding more and more like possession. I tried to sound like a serious, but curious FBI agent. I had a little backstory for myself. I was young and inexperienced and I hadn’t yet been jaded by the bureaucracy of federal law enforcement. I’d gotten into it because I really believed in justice and protecting the victims of crime. I was naïve, but I was open-minded and all I wanted was to help people.

Sometimes the drive can get boring, and writing yourself a backstory passes the time. Don’t judge me.

“You said “it”, Mr Resnick. If it wasn’t Juan, then what was it?”

“It was a…”

He jumped at the sound of a loud knock at the door. He looked at me, and then crossed the room to the front window, peering through the curtains.

“Men in Black…” he murmured to himself.

I sincerely doubted any secret organisation was here to silence Ronald, but I wanted him to trust me, so it made sense to play into his fears a little, if it got me what I needed.

“I don’t think this is the kind of thing the Men in Black investigate,” I told him.

He looked back towards me, still holding the curtain open a crack. “They’re real, though? They’re out there?”

I frowned. “I’m just a field agent, Mr. Resnick. But I know there’s things they ain’t telling me.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Figures.”

“Why don’t I answer the door,” I suggested. “See who it is. Make sure they know the FBI are onto this.”

“Mr. Resnick?” a voice called from outside. Ronald jumped. “Ronald Resnick!”

I held my hand up and motioned for Ronald to wait where he was as I went to the door. Two men in dark suits were certainly not Men in Black, but they could turn out to be actual FBI agents. Not that it would be a problem. I’d just have them call my Dad and he’d pose as a superior to get rid of them, but it was a pain and if they asked more questions, I’d have to hurry the case. Plus I’d have to burn the fake badge and make up a new identity.

I unbolted the door and opened it, to find myself looking out on two very familiar faces. It was Sam and Dean Winchester.

“Ma’am we…” Sam began. “Uh…”

They both had the common sense not to say anything further. “Agents?” I said, testing the water.

Sam gave a quick nod. “Agent?”

I quickly took out my badge and showed him the name on it.

“Of course, Agent Jones. From the South Dakota case. You remember her, Agent Bauer?”

“Right,” said Dean. “Right. How’s it going, Agent?”

Ronald peered around the door from the living room. “They’re FBI too?”

I nodded. “We can trust these guys, Mr Resnick. They’re with us on this one.”

With a nod from Ronald as permission I let Sam and Dean in quickly and then locked the door after them while Ronald led them through into his living room. The place was cluttered and since Ronald didn’t sit, none of us did either.

“Mr Resnick was just explaining to me that Juan Morales didn’t rob the Milwaukee National Trust. Right, Mr Resnick?”

“That’s… that’s right,” he said. “Me and Juan were friends. He used to come back to the bank on my night shifts and we’d play cards.”

“So, you let him into the bank that night?” asked Sam. “After hours?”

“The thing I let into the bank… wasn’t Juan. I mean, it had his face, but it wasn’t his face. Uh…” Ronald fumbled nervously. I could tell this was his big chance to be believed and he didn’t want to screw it up. “Every detail was perfect, but too perfect, you know. Like if a dollmaker made it, like I was talking to a big Juan doll.”

“A Juan doll?” asked Sam, with audible scepticism.

I shot him an annoyed look. We needed Ronald to talk about what he’d really seen, not get paranoid and close right up.

“Look, this wasn’t the only time this happened. Okay?”

He handed Sam a folder, and I shuffled over to look too. I had to lean into Sam a little to see properly, but he lowered the folder to a height where I could get a better look. It was a profile of a recent jewellery store heist. I’d been planning on looking into that same case the next day. It was impressive, a comprehensive file as good as anything I would put together.

“Both crimes were pulled by the same thing,” Ronald explained.

“What thing?” I asked, as Sam still looked at the file.

Ronald took a magazine and held it up for us to look. There was a picture of a silvery robot with a large print headline “BIRTH OF THE CYBERMEN”.

“Chinese have been working on them for years. And the Russians before that,” Ronald explained. “Part men, part machine. Like the Terminator. But the kind that can change itself, make itself look like other people.”

Dean gave a knowing smirk. “Like the one from T2.”

I hadn’t realised Dean was a sci-fi nerd. It seemed to please Ronald, though.

“Exactly!” he said, turning to Dean. “See, so not just a robot, more of a… a… a… a Mandroid!”

“A Mandroid,” scoffed Sam. “Uhnf!”

I had elbowed him in the ribs, but too late. Ronald had already heard his dismissive tone. He eyeballed Sam, as if still unsure that he weren’t one of the Men in Black. I moved back to stand next to Dean, trying to distance myself from Sam’s attitude.

“And what makes you so sure about this, Ronald?” Dean asked.

* * *

After Ronald showed us the bright flashing eyes of his friend Juan on the security tapes, Sam’s almost violent denial of the existence of Mandroids led to all three of us getting kicked out of the house. Sam had insisted on confiscating Ronald’s collected evidence, which was probably a good move, but it did have a creepy Men in Black vibe to it.

Since he had messed up my case, I’d said the least they could do was let me come back to their motel so we could discuss it together. Dean had agreed and I followed him in my car. It was a twenty minute ride back. They’d both changed out of their fed suits and now it was my turn.

Locked in the tiny bathroom, I took off the uncomfortable jacket and shoes and the even more annoying pantihose. Listening to the brothers arguing outside, I changed into jeans and a blue tank, throwing an old plaid button up over the top.

When I came out, Sam was sitting on one of the cheap plastic chairs, turned away from the table and towards the TV. He’d taken the weird tape from Ronald, and he had it playing on the motel room VCR. Behind him, Dean had a beer, maps and blueprints. Apparently, they’d both got straight to work.

“…just a guy who stumbled onto something real. If he were to go up against this thing, he’d get torn apart. Better to stay in the dark and stay alive.”

“Yeah, I guess,” admitted Dean.

He did have a point. I came up behind Sam to look at the video with him, as he paused it on the unusual frame. As the suspect, Juan, looked directly at the security camera, his eyes flashed brightly in a way that definitely was not human. And it definitely wasn’t a lens flare as the police (and then Sam) had told Ronald Resnick.

“Shapeshifter,” muttered Sam. “Just like back in St. Louis. Same retinal reaction to video.”

“Shapeshifter?” I asked. “You sure?”

I had never seen a shapeshifter before, and neither had my father. They were supposed to be able to turn into any person they wanted. That would explain how the crimes had been committed and the apparent suicides were murders designed to cover its tracks. That made a lot more sense than bank robbing demons.

“Eyes flare at the camera,” Dean told me. “I hate those friggin’ things.”

“You think I don’t?” asked Sam. He was in a real petulant mood and it was pretty easy to remember which was the little brother.

I left him where he was and pulled up a chair to sit next to Dean. He had a blueprint and tracing paper, marking some kind of pattern on it in thick red marker.

“Yeah, well, one didn’t turn into you and frame you for murder,” said Dean.

I gasped. “Shit. When did that happen?”

Dean looked up at me. “Last year.” He gave me the grin he always used to make light of a serious situation. “On the plus side, cops found his body, so now they think I got some cool rising from the crypt thing going on.”

I smiled back at him, treating the situation the way he wanted me to. “So… what’s with the blueprint?”

“They like to lay up underground. Preferably the sewer. And all the robberies have been connected so far, right?” He pointed on the blueprint to where the robberies had lined up with the sewer main.

“Yeah,” I nodded, as Sam stood up and began moving over to us.

“So, there’s one more bank lined up on that same main.”

I felt Sam behind me, looking at the map over my shoulder. He towered over me in a way that would have made me quite nervous if I didn’t remember him as a nerdy eight year old.

“City Bank of Milwaukee,” Sam said, reading the text above Dean’s finger on the street map.

“So… when is this thing gonna hit the bank?” I asked. “All the robberies have been at night. It’s still early…”

The shapeshifter could potentially be in the bank already, disguised as some employee it had murdered. And if the bank was the last target left on the line, we had to get there before the damn thing robbed it and moved on to another city.

“Could be tonight,” Sam agreed.

“Well, we gotta find a way in there, fast,” I said.

“Whoa,” said Dean. “We? Uh uh. Sam and I work alone, kiddo.”

I tensed up so quick, my elbow nearly flew into Dean’s face in a moment of rage, but I stopped myself.

“First of all, just because you remember me playing with dolls, don’t make me a child. I’m older than Sam.”

“Prettier, too,” said Dean. “Don’t mean you’re any easier to work with.”

Sam had the sense to step out of my way, as I paced my frustration out with wide strides across the room.

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“Uh…” said Sam, “I think he just means that Dean and I are used to each other. He knows what I’m gonna do, he knows how I think.”

“Right,” Dean agreed, backtracking in a great hurry. “I mean, obviously, you’re not an amateur. That haunting out in Boise, that was…” he whistled, “that was something. My kind of violence.”

I glared at him. I was pretty proud of the Boise thing. A triple haunting I’d worked with my Dad. He’d told anyone who would listen about me trying to strangle a poltergeist and pouring salt down its throat. “You trying to butter me up with flattery?”

“Is it working?” he asked, with his frustratingly charming grin.

A little. Plus him using the word “prettier” in relation to me made the fifteen year old still inside flip out completely and start doing cartwheels. But a girl has self-respect.

“Just barely,” I muttered. “This is some horseshit.”

“But you should check the sewers,” Sam said. “There’s no guarantee it’ll hit the bank tonight, anyway.”

He may have been trying to placate me, but he was actually right. If it did decide to hit the bank tonight, they’d be on the spot, but if it didn’t, they’d be in there for no reason, while the shapeshifter hid safely in the sewers.

“Fine,” I said, making it clear that I was willing to do it, but I still resented the second-class treatment.

“You’ll need a silver knife,” said Dean. “You got one?”

I did not, but while I went out to my car to get my heaviest boots, Sam came with me, to fetch me a knife from the stash in the boot of the Impala.

“He’s so full of shit,” I said, as we crossed the carpark.

“I thought you were going to give him the poltergeist treatment,” said Sam.

“I should have!”

He smiled, but whether it was at my words or my irritated face, or something else entirely, I couldn’t tell.


	6. Chapter 6: Messy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie gets messy while looking for the shapeshifter, but nothing can compare to the mess Sam and Dean are in.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during Episode 2x12

After a brief stop to secure the boys some identical blue jumpsuits from a local security company (never mind how!) we headed towards the City Bank of Milwaukee. I was in the backseat of the Impala, staring into the shiny blade of the silver knife and trying to decide whether I’d rather stab it into a shapeshifter or Dean. As we neared the bank, I was edging more towards the shapeshifter, but then Dean had to go and open his mouth again.

“You still pissy?” he asked. “Man, I only said…”

“Shut up and drive,” I muttered. “Sam, tell me how to kill this thing.”

“Pierce it through the heart,” he said. “With anything silver.”

“But, you know, probably don’t try,” Dean said. Before I could even open my mouth to swear at him, he went on. “And before you bite my head off, I’d say the same thing to Sam.”

“He’s right, Ellie,” Sam said. “I mean, these things are strong and they’re vicious. No one should try and take one on without backup.”

Dean pulled the car into an alley and the three of us got out. We were a short distance from the bank, but I realised why we’d stopped when Dean pointed to a manhole out on the road. They both walked over with me, and Sam took the cover off the manhole.

They both stood waiting for me, as I got my torch and knife onto my belt so I had both hands free to climb down. When I had myself sorted, I looked back up at them. Even Dean was a good six inches taller than me.

“Well, look at you two in your matching jumpsuits!” I teased. “Ain’t you adorable!”

Sam smiled. “Not a game you want to start playing when you’ve still got pink sheets.”

I ignored that. A girl can like pink and also killing monsters. The two ain’t mutually exclusive.

“Seriously,” said Dean. “If you think it’s down there, you get out and you call us, okay?”

“And if you see it, you call me,” I said. “I’m not wading in shit any longer than I have to.”

“Fair enough,” Dean agreed.

I started down the ladder, and I could see Dean’s head above, peering down at me as I went deeper into the darkness. I must have gone down ten feet or more before I finally felt the squelch of sewage beneath my right foot. I kept hold of the ladder, as I searched for solid ground. Once I found it, I got my other foot down. I didn’t want to yell out to the boys that I was at the bottom, so I let go of the ladder and reached for my torch. I turned it on and shined it directly up. Hopefully it shone into Dean’s eyes for a moment. It would only have been mildly irritating, but I was still annoyed and being petty.

I got the knife in my other hand, just in case. If the thing jumped me, I needed to be ready. I shone the torch around me to get a good look at where I was. It was just like any other city sewer, a wide concrete pipe with a light flow of gross sludge trickling along the bottom.

With no idea which way the shapeshifter’s home might be, I decided to head towards the bank. With the torchlight ahead of me, I tried to keep my ears open behind as I started off along the sewer. The sludge was too deep for me to really avoid, but it only just covered my ankles. I wondered if I should turn up the bottoms of my jeans, but it was probably too late for that.

Sam and Dean had gone into the bank armed with silver bullets and I began to second guess my decision not to take a gun. I’m competent with a gun, of course. How could I not be, with my daddy’s enthusiasm for shooting as a sport as well as a means of killing? I’m more than competent. But, for the most part, I prefer not to use a gun. You could call me hardcore, or reckless… Or, Hell, just plain crazy, but I liked to get in real close. When I killed something, I preferred to give it that personal touch. And literally touch it. Besides, I find the bastards often knock your gun away and it ends up being close combat anyway.

It was slow going, as I was trying not to make a whole lot of noise, not to shine the torch too far ahead of me and not slip in the sludge around my feet. Thanks to my pretty excellent display of stealth, I became used to silence, so I was not prepared for the sound of my phone ringing. I’d been walking about twenty minutes when I was suddenly shocked by the loudest sound I had ever heard. The banjo twang of my ringtone burst into the silence, and echoed off the concrete all around me. I was so startled that I jumped, failed to stick the landing and slipped in the sewage. I landed on my ass, and most of my right side. I could feel the sewage seeping through my clothes immediately.

I scrambled to get to my feet, the echoing bellow of my phone still ringing in my ears. It was a little sludgy, but it had survived the fall, and I wiped it on the cleanest part of my plaid, before putting it to my ear.

“If this isn’t important, I swear to God…”

“It’s here,” said Sam. “We found it.”

“Awesome,” I said, hoping that my tone indicated that I meant the exact opposite. “I am covered in shit for nothing. Thanks, Sam.”

“We’re going after it. Come back up and wait outside. We might need you for backup.”

“I’m twenty minutes away and underground. I hope you’ve already finished it off by the time I get to you.”

“Me too,” he said.

I hung up on him and put the phone back on my belt. The torch was sticking out of the sludge, still shining up onto the wall, and I could see myself, but not a whole lot else. I picked it up and wiped it, before angling it down into the sewage to look for the knife. I didn’t really want to have to get down onto my hands and knees and search for it, though at that point, I was already about as dirty as I could be.

Luckily, I saw it glinting in the torch light and I was able to pick it up and put it back on my belt before starting to walk back the way I had come. The January chill had been okay on the way in, but with half my clothes soaked, it was much colder now. I took off my plaid and wrapped it around my waist, figuring bare arms were better than wet flannel.

Since I no longer cared about the noise I made, and since slipping and falling again couldn’t make me wetter, I was able to hurry. Still, I couldn’t have saved much more than five minutes. I finally found the ladder, and looked up. I could see stars above and breathed out with relief. I was only ten feet from a change of clothes. I’d have to wait for Dean to come back with his car keys, but how long did it take to shoot a shapeshifter?

As I climbed up, I thought I heard sirens. Definitely in the plural. Beginning to feel uneasy, I moved a little quicker, finally hauling myself up and out of the sewer. My ears still ringing with the sirens, I kicked the manhole cover back in place. There was a lot more activity on the road now, but all of it was rushing past me. An ambulance, three police cars, all headed towards the bank. With a sigh, I ran quickly across the road and back to the alley where we’d left the Impala. It was still there. I hopped up to sit on the bonnet, and took off my boots. I could at least get my soaked through socks off before I went looking to see what was going on.

I left my dirty socks on Dean’s car with something of a satisfied feeling. I also quickly threw the silver knife underneath the car. With so many cops around, I wanted to look like an ordinary nosy citizen. Hopefully, three police cars equalled sufficient chaos that no one would question my odour.

As I headed down the street towards the bank, a helicopter flew over. I was getting closer and closer to the source of the sirens. Then I rounded a corner and yep… The road outside the bank was totally blocked off. Police cars and S.W.A.T. vans formed a safe perimeter and a busy bustle of uniformed folks were hustling, shouting out to each other and babbling into radios and cell phones. I looked up into the windows of the building opposite and saw snipers.

“Ah, balls!”

I grabbed my phone again and dialled Sam. He answered after the first ring.

“Uh…”

“Sam, tell me the S.W.A.T. team is not for you.”

“Technically it’s for Ronald,” he said. “He, uh… took matters into his own hands.”

“There are snipers, Sam.” I could practically hear his bitchface through the phone. “Did you at least kill it?”

“It… I… We got a little distracted, Ellie.”

“Well, shit,” I muttered at him. “What’s happening? What’s Ronald want?”

“He’s not letting anyone go until we find it and kill it.”

“Well, I can definitely see how my wild unpredictability would have made this worse,” I hissed.

“That was Dean!” he said, defensively. “Look, I gotta go. Just… I don’t know. Bye.”

I rolled my eyes. “Idjits.”

* * *

I lingered around the police barrier for an hour, waiting for something to happen. It was difficult to make out what was going on inside the bank. The S.W.A.T. team stood ready, but never advanced, and there seemed to be a lot of action surrounding some kind of communications van. I figured they were probably ringing inside to talk to Ronald. Maybe this could work out well. Although probably not for Ronald. If Sam and Dean killed the shapeshifter, Ronald would let everyone go, and he’d be written off as crazy for all his talk about Mandroids. Sam and Dean would get away and I could get a change of clothes.

All of a sudden, there was action. An ambulance moved forward through the line of cop cars and the S.W.A.T. guys edged closer to the building. Paramedics got out of the ambulance and began to approach the doors, a stretcher at the ready. I could only see shadows inside the building as someone approached the glass doors. Craning my neck to see, I watched in horror as two men came out of the building. A middle-aged security guard, looking somewhat worse for wear. And Dean. There was shouting from the cops, and some shouting from Dean. His face was clearly visible in the light from at least a dozen spotlights. With a startled rabbit-in-headlights expression, he began shouting at the cops. As the older man moved towards the paramedics and the stretcher, Dean quickly ducked back into the building, shutting the doors behind him.

Now, I knew who he was and what he was doing in that bank, but even to me, he looked a whole lot like a hostage taker. The cops would definitely reach that conclusion. I rolled my eyes and ran back away from the barrier again, getting my cell out as I did so. I found Dean in my contacts and dialled him.

“Not a good time, Ellie!”

“Dean Winchester, tell me I did  _not_  just see you shouting at the police to get back, while clearly displaying your face! And then locking yourself in with a bunch of hostages.”

“Like I said, not a good time!”

“What is  _wrong_  with you?! And why haven’t you found the damn thing? How hard can it be?”

“You wanna come in here and do this?” he asked.

I groaned. If I had been in there, maybe this shitstorm could have been avoided. “I’d love to help you, Dean, but I’m real hard to work with.”

“Son of a…” he began. “How about you do something useful?”

“What do you want me to do, create a diversion? Every cop in Wisconsin is here. I’d have to nuke the State Legislature!”

I heard the call waiting beep on his side of the line. “Sam’s calling. I gotta go.”

“This is unbelievable.”

“Bye, Ellie!”

He hung up on me and I was left waiting again, standing about in the street, cold and covered in crusty dry sewage. Do something useful, Dean had said. Great idea in theory, and I wanted to help, but what could I possibly do? A few cops can be distracted, but not that many. Was there any way I could get into the building? Probably not. If they even remotely knew what they were doing, the cops would have any back or side doors covered. If I hadn’t been alone, I could have had someone else divert the attention of the cops watching the back door and slip through.

But there was no sense dwelling on what I could have done if only. I needed to focus on what I could do. Maybe I had no way to get inside the bank, or even see inside, but… Sam and Dean couldn’t really see out either. So, that was a way I could help. I could let them know what was happening outside.

I ran back up to the police barricade and joined the crowd of curious onlookers. This time, instead of just looking on in exasperation and thinking about all the ways I wouldn’t have let this happen, I focused on gathering useful information. I counted the different kinds of cops. I watched the communication van to try and get a sense of who was in charge. And when the feds rolled up, I counted them too.

Once the FBI arrived, the tone of the other cops changed immediately. The S.W.A.T. team started rearranging itself, apparently getting ready for action. The local cops who had originally been handling the situation were pacing near their van, apparently agitated.

I stepped back from the barricade and walked a little way down the street and around the corner. The last thing I needed was to be overheard by one of the cops and picked up as an accessory. I hit redial and after a couple of rings the phone was answered by Dean’s irritated voice.

“Dammit, Ellie…”

I cut him off. “Shut up. I’m being useful. The S.W.A.T. guys look like they’re getting ready to come in. There’s FBI here.”

“I know,” he said. “They called in. Know who I am. Sammy too.”

“There’s sixteen guys on the S.W.A.T. team, best I can make out. But I can’t see the back door. Have you found the shifter yet?”

“It changes quick,” Dean said. “Real quick.”

“You don’t have long,” I warned him. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Find it, kill it. Hide so the S.W.A.T. guys have to spread out to look for you. Then you jump a couple, take their uniforms.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Cos of the masks. Scope us out a good getaway route and wait by the car.”

“Okay,” I said. “And… um… you know. Be careful, Dean.”

“You’re not hard to work with, Ellie,” he said. “And you aren’t a kid.”

As grateful as I was for the apology (such as it was), it didn’t really seem like the time to have a touching moment. He still needed to find that shapeshifter and I had an escape route to plan.

“Go beat up some cops, already,” I told him and hung up.

I had to go around the barricades to get back to the Impala, looking down side streets as I did. I assessed each one, trying to make out what was where. Arriving back in the alley, I had to get down on my stomach to fetch the knife from under the car. My socks were still on the bonnet, but since I had laid them out flat, they were now dry, though the encrusted dirt and shit made them so solid I thought I could probably snap them in half. I did my best to roll them up so they’d fit in my pockets.

I didn’t want to move too far from the car, but I peeked around the corners at both ends of the alley, before going back to sit on the bonnet.

They came running towards me, in full body armour and I smirked. Matching outfits again. They’d even taken the guns. I jumped up and I was ready to help them as soon as they reached me.

Sam handed me his gun before reaching up to take off the helmet. “Oh hell yes,” I said looking at it closely. Police issue rifle!

“Keep it,” said Sam, trying to take off the balaclava while Dean unlocked the car.

I got into the back seat, taking the helmets and guns with me. Better to dump what we didn’t want a long way off.

Dean was behind the wheel already and Sam got in the passenger side with a heavy sigh.

“We are so screwed,” said Dean.

“What happened?” I asked, as he turned the ignition. “Go straight ahead and turn right out of the alley.”

“Well, we have our own FBI task force now,” Dean said. “So, that’s a thing.”

I had a sudden realisation. With all my worry about Dean’s face getting on camera, and a degree of selfish fixation on the fact I was covered in sewage, I had forgotten something. “Wait! What happened to Ronald?”

Sam sighed. “Sniper.”

Oh God. Poor guy was just trying to fight a monster. He was wrong about what kind of monster it was, but Mandroid or shapeshifter, it didn’t really matter. The point was that he had seen something odd where most people would not. He had been convinced there was something off about his friend robbing that bank and he’d been right. He had persisted when people told him he was crazy.

Maybe the Mandroid was a ridiculous theory, but he’d been working with what information was available to him. And no one would ever know the good he had tried to do. His family was going to have to live with the belief he’d snapped and taken a bunch of hostages. They’d never understand his motives.

“Poor Ronald,” I said. “He was so close to being right.”

Ronald was dead. Sam and Dean were fugitives from justice and the other hostages were probably scarred for life. Some of them had been killed by the shapeshifter. Under the circumstances, getting a little shit on me was a lucky break.


	7. Chapter 7: Possession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam stops by to visit Ellie, but her failure to listen to her instincts gets her into serious trouble.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 2x14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ever since “Swan Song” (5x22), I’ve felt like “Born Under a Bad Sign” (2x14) could have been awesome foreshadowing, if the writers had only known where Sams’ story was ultimately going. This gave me an opportunity to explore that and plant the seed far earlier that Sam has the potential to fight the Devil.

As much as I loved my father, it was nice to be home alone sometimes. Dad was in Oregon, helping an old friend with a hunt and all I had to do was be available if he called needing me to research something for him. His absence was an opportunity to rearrange the library and get some sort of order back. It wasn’t that he objected to me doing it, he just didn’t like all the books in his way during the long sorting process. Without him there, I could pull everything out onto the floor and sort into piles. He was going to be gone at least a week, so I was thinking about getting together some kind of electronic cataloguing system. Maybe someday, I could even scan the whole library, make it available to other Hunters digitally.

Since we lived so far out of town, I could blast Dixie Chicks loud as I liked, while I transferred old books from the shelves to piles on the floor. It was hard to figure out what kind of categories to use, but I knew I needed demonology for sure, and another pile for witchcraft. They’d previously been organised alphabetically by title and that was a mess unless you were Dad and knew exactly what was in each book.

I was dancing a little bit as I worked, wiggling my way up the step-ladder in a way that was probably unsafe, but I always did like living dangerously. Sorting books and grooving to very loud music, occasionally taking a sip of my beer: is there a better way to spend an evening? I doubt it! That’s why I was irritated when I heard knocking at the door. It was quite an insistent banging, and I realised whoever it was might have been knocking for some time. I quickly dumped the books in my hands onto the table and ran to pause the stereo before I went through to the front door.

Just before I opened the door, I realised I was not wearing a lot. Though it was quite brisk outside, it could get hot in the house, especially when you were climbing up and down a step ladder. I was just in a rather tight tanktop and a pair of jean shorts (emphasis on the short). I only thought about it for a moment before shrugging it off. You knock on someone’s door at 10pm, you can’t expect them to be dressed to entertain.

I opened the inner door and found myself looking through the screen at Sam Winchester. I hadn’t seen him since the bank thing in Milwaukee.

“Sam!”

I looked back down at my outfit. Suddenly it mattered a whole lot more, which I knew to be ridiculous, but I blushed a little anyway.

“Hi Ellie. Is your dad here?”

Then I frowned. He might not have been there to see me, but he didn’t need to be so upfront about that. He could at least have pretended to find me remotely interesting before asking for Dad.

“Nope,” I said. “Sorry.”

He smiled, but it wasn’t his usual smile. He didn’t have the brightness in his eyes that came with his smile, and his dimples barely showed up at all.

“Great. I came to see you.”

I didn’t believe that for a second. If he came to see me, he had no reason to ask about Dad before even coming inside, unless his intention was to have a bucketload of sex with me. I wouldn’t have said no, but I strongly doubted that was his reason for stopping by.

“That’s nice of you to say, Sam, but we both know it’s not true.” I opened the screen door for him. “Still, you may as well come in anyway.”

He came through, but stopped just in the doorway, grabbing me into a hug. It was warm and friendly, as his hugs always were, but something about it didn’t feel right. I put it down to his being worried about something. Presumably that’s why he had come.

“Where’s Dean?” I asked as he released me, and I shut the door.

“Off with a twelve pack and some girl,” he said, moving ahead of me into the library.

I was not surprised, but I wasn’t judgemental either. Hunting is a stressful business. Might as well make a weekend of it if you can.

“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “I’m rearranging.”

“Looks like a big job,” he said.

“Dad’s been building this collection near twenty years,” I told him, gesturing towards the desk chair.

He did not sit down, but stood in the centre of the room, looking at me with an odd expression. It made me uncomfortable but if anyone had asked me why, I wouldn’t have been able to say.

“So, what did you want Dad for?” I asked.

“I told you, I came to see you,” he said.

I laughed, and I could hear a nervous edge. I hoped that he couldn’t. I leant against the back of the sofa, trying to look casual. “Okay. So, what do you want with me?”

“Just to talk,” he said, taking two steps closer to me. He was now between me and the door, but of course it wasn’t deliberate. I’d known Sam since I was eight years old. I could trust him.

“I got a phone,” I said, forcing a smile. Every instinct told me to run away from Sam, but I didn’t listen.

He really was very tall. And so broad across the chest and shoulders. I was trained to fight, but then, so was he. I swallowed as he came closer to me, wondering what I would do if he attacked me. But of course he wouldn’t. I was being paranoid.

He stood beside me, leaning into the sofa just the way I did.

“Some things you need to talk about in person,” he said.

I looked into his eyes, but I couldn’t read anything there. I had a sudden thought about shapeshifters. Back in Wisconsin, Ronald had known it wasn’t his friend he was talking to, but he’d never explained why. Perhaps this had been what he felt. The face was right, the eyes were right, the voice was right. Nothing specific was wrong with this Sam. But something undefinable just felt a little off.

Not knowing what to say, I just nodded. Maybe I should just ask him to take a silver test.

“Why didn’t you believe me when I said I came here to see you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “You asked for my father first. Besides, what reason you got to come and see me? I don’t know anything Dad doesn’t.”

“Maybe I came for something your dad can’t give me,” he said.

I stared at him, and I was pretty sure my mouth was open. That couldn’t mean what it sounded like. Perhaps Sam and I had flirted a little in Wisconsin, but it had been barely more than a few teasing words. Just the kind of stuff you said to one another when you had years of history. Even to call it flirting was probably going a bit far.

In any case, friend or not, Sam Winchester was not really in my league. I thought I was okay looking. I didn’t like the colour of my hair, and I’d have liked to shift some fat from my butt to my breasts. My face was nothing to write home about, but now I was out of my spotty adolescence, I could look in the mirror without cringing. But both the Winchester boys were on a different level. Tall and handsome, they could have meaningless sex with anyone they liked. So the idea that Sam would drive all that way for mediocre me was ridiculous.

“Is that so hard to believe?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me what you really want.”

He leaned in closer to me, and I felt my stomach leap. As his lips brushed against my ear, I had one brief moment of thinking that this unlikely scenario was actually happening. But as soon as he spoke, I realised just how right my first instincts were.

“I promised to kill you,” he whispered.

My reflexes are fast, but before I could move, he had grabbed my left arm, his grip tight around my bicep. I screamed, as a reflex, but immediately stopped myself. This was not a time for screaming, it was a time for fighting.

I kicked out at Sam, or whatever was pretending to be Sam, and tried to twist my arm to get out of the hold. He responded by hitting me in the face, with a blow so strong it must have had some kind of supernatural force behind it. I flew backward, slamming down hard against the floor, at least a metre back. Ignoring the pain, I tried to get up, but I was a little winded.

Taking large strides towards me, Sam was looking down at me with a smile that was not his. It looked totally out of place on his face. His eyes flashed black and I realised what I should have earlier. He was possessed by a demon.

“Wow, little girl. You are  _really_  messed up,” it said. “You just hate yourself, don’t you?”

I did not hate myself. I was realistic and I didn’t tell myself lies, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like myself. I tried to control my breathing so I could get to my feet. There was a flask of holy water in the kitchen. I just needed to get to it. But the demon in Sam was between me and the door. I probably couldn’t win a fight against Sam under normal circumstances. A demon using his body was much stronger.

What I needed was to get in a position so that when it hit me again, I would fly closer to the door. Then, if my legs weren’t broken, I would have a better chance of getting into the kitchen. Hoping adrenaline would help me through the coming pain, I tucked my head and pushed myself into a forward roll.

Coming out of it, I got to my feet as quick as I could, while the demon turned to face me again. I took a step back. There was no point trying to hit it first. Better to get close to the kitchen as I could.

“I had you for a second, though, didn’t I?” it said. “For a moment there you really believed Sammy here would be interested in a girl like you. Come on, Ellie… How could that ever happen?”

How could a demon get inside my head while still possessing someone else? How did it know what I was thinking? Demons could be perceptive, but they weren’t mind readers. The only mind this thing could read was Sam’s.

Then I remembered. Sam! He was still in there, just like Meg had been. When the demon had hit me, Sam had felt his hand slam across my face. Was he trying to fight it? Was he angry that something had taken his body? Was he scared? I was his friend and he surely didn’t want to hurt me. What about Dean? Had the demon used Sam’s body to hurt his brother?

I still had nightmares about poor Meg, stuck as a passenger in her own body for over a year. Looking out of her eyes like they were just windows, feeling her arms and legs moved like a marionette. She’d seen and felt it all, but she could never act.

“Sam!” I called out. “It’s okay, Sam! We’ll get it out of you! Don’t worry!”

I was prepared for a hit. I was not expecting it to grab me by the neck. Sam’s large hand closed over my throat and squeezed as I was lifted away from the ground. Struggling just to get air through my aching windpipe, I didn’t have time to think of a plan.

It shook its head, a smug smile marring Sam’s face. “Aren’t you just the sweetest thing? I’m gonna use Sam’s hands to rip you apart, and you’re trying to make him feel better.”

Unsure whether kicking at it would waste my energy, I was focusing just on breathing. I suddenly felt a rush of oxygen as it let go of my neck, but it was a short-lived victory. Before I knew I was moving, I was crashing into some shelves. I hit with the whole of my back and my head and crumpled down to the floor. Everything hurt. I was light headed and spots were dancing in front of my vision, but I was dimly aware that I was just inches from the arch through to the kitchen. This was my chance to run.

Forcing my body to stand, I then pushed myself to run through into the kitchen. Dad always kept a flask of Holy Water on a shelf there. All I had to do was grab it before the demon got to me. I could hear it behind me as I made a desperate lunge for the shelf. But I wasn’t fast enough, and it pulled me back by my hair. It was so painful, I hoped it would just rip a chunk of hair out altogether. Even if it took skin with it, at least that would be quick. Being pulled from one room to another by my hair was excruciating and it seemed to take forever.

“You know what?” I heard it say, above me. “Sam  _is_  worried, Ellie. Because he knows you’re useless. He knows how weak you are.” It finally let go of my hair and I tried to get up, but it pushed me back down. It gripped my arm so tightly it felt like a clamp had closed on me. Sam’s hand fit around my forearm with plenty of room to spare. “The Winchesters got big. And you’re still just little Ellie.”

I screamed as it yanked hard and I felt my bone snapping. Sam’s face went out of focus for a few seconds and maybe I even passed out just for a moment. The intensity of the pain was making me lightheaded and the floating dots were back again. I couldn’t think or feel much through the haze of pain, but I realised it was going to kill me and it was going to use my friend’s body to do it.

I tried to clear my mind. I took quick shallow breaths to fight through the pain. This thing was stronger than me. Even if I could fight it with one arm, I didn’t stand a chance unless I distracted it. I needed to put its focus somewhere else just for a moment. If only I hadn’t been home alone, someone else would have the chance to sneak up behind it. But I was the only one there. It was just me and the demon.

And Sam…

“Sam!” I called again. “You gotta fight it Sam, please!”

The demon laughed. “You think he hasn’t been fighting? Sweetie, you are too much!”

Of course he’d been fighting. Sam wasn’t going to let a demon just ride around in his body without putting up resistance. He certainly wasn’t going to let it kill me if he could stop it. Obviously, he couldn’t stop it. But he didn’t need to take control back. He just needed to fight hard enough and loud enough to distract it. Just a second or two so I could get an advantage. I did not want to die.

“Come on, Sam!” I yelled. “You can beat it! I know it!”

And that was it. That was the moment. Sam’s hand was reaching towards my throat again, but then it stopped moving. Maybe if I hadn’t been so winded and in pain, I’d have missed it, but the whole world seemed to be slowing down and I saw it happen, like a slow motion replay. A flash of something in its eyes. A moment of confusion. Just for a split second, the demon was unsure of itself.

I kicked it in the face, and it went flying backwards, scattering my neat piles of books across the library floor. A particularly heavy tome was just a few inches from my feet. With a throbbing pain in my right arm, I kept breathing those short, shallow breaths and picked the book up with both hands. My weakened right arm was barely any help at all, but I had to hold on. The demon was getting back to its feet.

Using my left shoulder as the driving force, I smacked the book into the side of Sam’s head, as hard as I possibly could. My grip was so weak that the impact made the book fly right out of my hands, but it didn’t matter. He crumpled. Nervously, I approached. Putting my left foot forward, I prodded him with my big toe. There was no response.

How long would a demon stay knocked out? Even though my arm was broken and the pain was still throbbing in my head, I had to act quick. Fortunately, we kept all kinds of stuff in our library that most people would not.

I started by drawing a devil’s trap around his unconscious form. At the very least, if he woke up, all I had to do was run across the chalk line and I would be safe. But even the effort of doing that much was exhausting. Leaving him lying on the library floor, I got myself a safe distance away from the trap. My cell phone was still sitting on the desk. With only my left hand, I was able to look through my contacts list and press dial.

“Ellie? Ellie! Thank God!”

I thanked God, or whatever force there was, that he was okay too.

“Dean. I think I found something you lost.”


	8. Chapter 8: Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has incapacitated the possessed Sam, but she and Dean still need to exorcise the demon inside him.
> 
> The Chapter takes place during Episode 2x14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Ellie. Trouble is, in the show the characters take many totally unrealistic beatings, and that’s fine on TV, but it doesn’t work so well for the written word. Therefore, Ellie’s injuries are more severe than the Winchester brothers usually experience. But that’s okay. I found a way to write it into the plot.

Dean arrived only ten minutes later. He’d suspected Sam was coming, but his attempt to ring the house had found our line out of order. The demon must have cut it. Why it hadn’t occurred to Dean to ring my cell, I didn’t know. Presumably he’d panicked.

I was still sitting against the wall, clutching my phone and watching the unconscious Sam carefully. If the demon woke and tried to get out of the devil’s trap, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. I was exhausted, my head was pounding and absolutely everything hurt, especially my broken arm.

When I heard a sound at the back door, I called out and Dean ran in. He took in the chaos of the room, his brother and me. I thought he’d check Sam first, since I was clearly alive and conscious, but he came straight over to me.

“Ellie! Hey! Hey, are you okay?”

I smiled at the absurdity of the question. “Peachy.”

He got down on the ground with me and grabbed my face, turning my head one way and then the other. The pressure of his hands on my cheeks was painful, but I barely registered it over the rest of my pain.

“What happened? What did he do?”

“Hit me, choked me, threw me into a wall. I think my arm’s broken. But Dean, you gotta tie him up! I don’t know how hard I hit him and he might wake up.”

He let me go and turned to look at Sam lying in the devil’s trap. I tried to get up at the same time as he did, but it was hard to focus.

“Stay there,” he said. “You have a concussion.”

I knew for a fact that the Winchesters were thrown into walls and hit in the head on a pretty regular basis. If they could handle it, I could too. At least, that was how I felt at first, but as soon as I got to my feet, I regretted it. I must have been running on adrenaline and now it was gone, my body realised what was going on.

Dean sure did have some reflexes. He caught me as I fell and led me over to the sofa, past Sam. He lowered me down and lifted my legs up, pushing my shoulders back so I was lying down. “I gotta deal with him. You lie there and just keep talking to me, okay.”

“Okay…” I muttered. It was beginning to dawn on me that I was pretty hurt. However badly I wanted to appear strong and unbreakable, Dean wasn’t going to buy it. I was clearly broken.

Dean got down on his knees to look at his brother. “Damn, Ellie. What’d you hit him with?”

“A book,” I said. “Big book.”

“Nice work. He’s really out. Rope?”

“That cupboard,” I said, pointing vaguely. “I knew something was off about him, but I just ignored it.”

Over by the cupboard, Dean shrugged. “At least you know your instincts are good.”

“I ignored them,” I said. I was starting to feel sleepy all of a sudden. Getting my ass kicked had made me real tired. “I’m so stupid.”

“I dunno,” said Dean. He had the rope in one hand and was dragging a chair across the room with the other. “You trust your friends and you don’t wanna believe they’ll try and kill you. Seems like a good kind of stupid to be.”

Next thing I knew, he was shaking me. “Ellie! Ellie, come on, wake up, kiddo!”

I wanted to wake up but I was very sleepy. Something icy cold was pressed against my forehead and that jolted me back to myself. Dean was holding an ice pack to my head, an expression of intense concern.

Laughter suddenly cut through the silence. Sam’s laughter, or at least, laughter that came from his body. But darker and crueller than he would ever be. The demon inside him was awake, and watching us through black eyes.

“Dean. Back from the dead again. You’re like a cockroach.”

“How about I smack that smartass right out of your mouth?” said Dean, lifting my hand up to hold the icepack. “You, hold that there.”

I nodded, though he was no longer looking at me.

“Whoa, careful now,” said the demon. “Wouldn’t want to bruise this fine packaging.”

“Oh don’t worry. This isn’t gonna hurt Sam much,” he went towards the kitchen and picked up a bucket I didn’t remember him filling. I must have been out several minutes. “You, on the other hand…”

He threw holy water over Sam, and I could hear it sizzle even over the sound of the demon roaring in pain. I really hoped Sam couldn’t feel it.

“Feel like talking now?” asked Dean.

“Sam’s still my meat puppet,” it said. “I’ll make him bite off his tongue.”

“No, you won’t be in him long enough.” Picking up a book from beside me, he started to read in Latin. It was an exorcism ritual.

Still holding the icepack to my forehead, I sat up straight, watching the demon. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t reacting to Dean’s words at all and the last time, the ritual had made the demon writhe within the body, and psychically move the chair.

“Dean…” I muttered.

It smiled. “Doesn’t seem to be working, does it? I learned a few new tricks.”

It lowered its head and began chanting. It was definitely Latin and I caught the odd word: spirit, anger, Lord. But I was far too groggy to really understand it. All of a sudden the logs in the fireplace burst into flame. Maybe I was really out of it, but the room seemed to be shaking.

“This isn’t going like I pictured!” Dean yelled, over the demon’s chanting. “Ellie?”

I looked Sam up and down. It had seemed like a totally normal possession. An exorcism ought to have… his arm! There was something on his arm and a thought struggled sluggishly into my mind. It was a swimmer at the bottom of a murky pool, trying to fight against the water and make its way to the surface. A strange burn on Sam’s arm. Like a Q. I had seen it somewhere before.

As I desperately tried to recall it, Sam threw his head back and an unearthly scream came out of his mouth. It shook the whole house, and two floorboards split, their broken ends flying upwards. That broke the devil’s trap and the demon used the opportunity to break free of the ropes Dean had bound it with.

“There. That’s better.”

Dean very obviously stepped between me and the demon, but it only smiled at him.

“Oh that’s sweet. Still trying to save her? I promised you I’d tear her up, Dean, and I will.”

It jerked its head and I felt myself flying upward. I couldn’t help screaming as I flung my hands up, instinctively protecting my head.

I hit the wall, winded by the force and seeing double. I had no idea what was going on around me, or what was happening to Dean. I was too busy just trying to figure out which way up I was. And all the time, that thought was still there, still trying to get to the surface. Clutching my head with my good arm, I tuned back in to reality only to see Sam bent over Dean, holding his head in place to hit him harder.

“You sent me back there,” it was saying.

“Meg,” Dean said.

Meg! The demon possessing Sam was Meg. It had come looking for me and Dad because we’d helped with its exorcism.

“No. Not anymore. Now I’m Sam.” It hit Dean again before it went on taunting him. “By the way, I saw your Dad there. He says howdy.”

Dean was trying to fight against its grip, and though my vision was blurry it was obvious he was failing.

“All that I had to hold onto was that I could climb out one day and that I was going to torture you. Nice and slow. Like pulling the wings off an insect. But whatever I do to you, it’s nothing compared to what you do to yourself, is it? I can see it in your eyes, Dean. You’re worthless.”

I had to help Dean. I forced myself back to a crawl, wondering where I kept finding extra reserves of strength. I could barely think at all, I could feel nothing but pain. But I could still get to my feet and still move towards Dean.

_Dammit, Ellie, listen to me!_

The thought was now jumping up and down with its hand raised. It was a child desperate for the teacher’s attention. It knew the answer. It could help.

I stopped and forced myself to think through the haze of pain and fear. That Q shaped burn. Where had I seen it? And then I remembered. All of a sudden it was there. It was a binding sigil. It was binding Meg’s essence inside Sam. Without it, she wouldn’t be able to stay. I wouldn’t even need an exorcism to get her out.

Now one thought had been able to break through, a second found its way much more easily. The fire! I limped to the fireplace and grabbed the poker, thrusting it into the flames.

“You couldn’t save your Dad…” Meg was telling Dean.

The unnatural fire must have been very hot. I could feel the heat of the poker rising under my hand, but I needed to wait longer. It had to be red hot.

“You can’t save little Ellie over there…”

The tip of the poker glowed pink and that seemed good enough. I hobbled towards Dean and Meg.

“And deep down, you know that you can’t save your brother. They’d have been better off without you.”

As Meg lifted Sam’s arm back to hit Dean again, I grabbed it with my right hand. Although I had no grip and the pain was intense, it was enough. Meg turned back towards me, the arm turned just the right way.

_Sorry Sam_ , I thought and thrust the poker forward with my left hand. It made contact with the binding sigil and I held for as long as I could, burning it right off his arm.

Finally out of strength, I felt myself falling as everything started to go black.

* * *

I woke up. I was lying on something soft and I was warm. It took me a couple of tries to open my eyes properly, but when I did, I realised where I was. I was in my own bed, lying on my back, but with my head turned towards the window. I could see my postcards stuck up on the wall. I did a mental check of my body. My broken arm was in a sling and it still hurt. Everything still hurt. I’d been put to bed very neatly. My good arm lay beside me, with the bad one gently across my chest. I had both my blankets over me, covering me completely and tucked in on either side of me.

There was still a lot of pain in my head, but to feel a pillow underneath eased it considerably. I flipped my head over on the pillow to see the other side, and I realised I was not alone. Sam was in the room with me.

Remembering the feel of his hand around my neck, I suddenly felt sick. I tried to use my good hand to push myself up to a sitting position, so I could at least defend myself.

But those eyes were definitely Sam’s. Surely no demon was capable of looking quite so much liked a kicked puppy. The way I flinched at the sight of him was obviously painful to him. I didn’t really want to care, since I was in extreme physical pain that he had inflicted. But I knew that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been in control. He’d fought to help me, I’d seen it.

“Ellie, I’m so sorry,” he said.

I waved away his apology. “It wasn’t you. I know it wasn’t you.”

He shook his head. “But Meg only came after you because she knew it would hurt me. And Dean.”

I tried again to sit up and this time I didn’t flinch as he reached over to help steady me. My back ended up straight against the wall, but Sam got up and grabbed my other pillow from the desk. I would have taken it from him and sorted myself out, but he gestured for me to lean forward, and then balanced both pillows behind my back. It felt much better went I leant back again.

“Do you remember it all?” I asked and he swallowed heavily, before nodding. “How’s your arm?”

He held his muscled forearm out to show me. There was a tight bandage around it, only a thin one, just enough to cover the place where I’d burned him.

“Bobby says it was a binding sigil,” he said. “He said he showed it to you once, years ago. You remembered that? While you were concussed?”

“It was slow going,” I admitted. “But I got there in the end.”

“Wow. First time I ever saw you in an actual fight,” he said. “And I was the target.”

“Could you feel it when I hit her?” I asked.

“Yes. Pretty sure if you’d used two good arms to hit me with that book, you would have killed me.”

I smiled. “Couldn’t risk Dean getting here and saving my life. I’d never hear the end of it.”

That made him laugh and it was that sound that brought feelings of safety and comfort flooding back. That was my friend, for real this time.

“I should have known it wasn’t you,” I said.

A good Hunter should know the difference between their friend and a demon, and if I’d had any kind of brain at all, I’d have splashed him with holy water before I ever let him through my door. Maybe Meg had been right about me. Every instinct had been telling me Sam would never bother driving miles to see me. And they’d been right, but maybe I didn’t want to listen because I wanted to be wrong…

“She fooled Dean for two days,” Sam told me, and I hoped he didn’t notice my sudden blush. “And you did know. She just didn’t give you time to react.”

Dean really hadn’t noticed for two days? That probably shouldn’t have made me happy but it did, somehow. If she’d fooled Dean, it wasn’t my fault that she’d fooled me. His own brother hadn’t known he was possessed. How was I supposed to?

“How’s Dean, anyway?” I asked. “She beat him up pretty bad.”

Sam frowned as he nodded, and I could almost read his mind. I said “she” beat him up, but I knew he was thinking that he did it. He’d watched himself do it and felt himself doing it.

“He’s okay. Pretty bruised, but he’s tough. He came out better than you did.”

I sighed. Dean was tough and I obviously was not. Whatever progress I’d made towards proving myself equal to a Winchester by fighting with a broken arm and saving Dean’s life had been completely erased by passing out. I was never going to be seen as a good Hunter. I’d always just be good, for a girl.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked, leaning forward quickly. “Are you okay?”

“I just sighed, Sam. I’m not that fragile!”

Surprised that I snapped at him, he leant back again, and stammered nervously. “Uh… okay… Sorry. Um… I should get your dad anyway. He’s pretty worried about you.”

“You called my dad back?” I groaned. “Sam!”

He was standing up already. “You nearly died, Ellie! Of course I called him.”

I sighed again, throwing my head back into the pillow. Calling my father was probably the right thing to do, but it still irritated me. Sam was a year younger than me, and I would never have felt it necessary to call his father, if he still had one. But I supposed, I would have called Dean. I would have called someone who loved him. Maybe I just needed to stop judging myself by Winchester standards, but I couldn’t help it. That was how they were judging me.


	9. Chapter 9: Emails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over the two months it takes for her broken arm to heal, Ellie and Sam exchange emails.
> 
> These emails cover the period between 2x15 (Tall Tales) and 2x20 (What Is And What Should Never Be). Sam writes to Ellie about some of the events in those episodes, but sometimes he is more vague.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the hardest episode I have written. Getting Sam’s voice right for his emails was SUPER challenging. I hope I did okay.

_Hi Sam,_

_I just wanted to say sorry for being so pissy with you last week. Guess it probably would have been easier to just NOT be pissy, but hey, I like to do things the hard way. Anyway, I’m sorry. It has nothing to do with what happened and honestly, I don’t blame you for what Meg did. It was just a stupid thing I had going on inside my head and it’s my issue, not yours. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I guess I don’t handle pain that well and it makes me kind of a bitch. :(_

_Please tell Dean I’m sorry too, but I know you got the worst of it. You didn’t need that when you were already feeling bad about what happened. :(_

_All the best,_

_Ellie_

* * *

_Dear Ellie,_

_I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you all day. I don’t want to say I accept your apology because I really don’t feel like you have anything to apologise for. But I know you think I did nothing wrong either, no matter how much I hurt you._

_Why don’t we both just stop feeling guilty and start being friends again? How are you? How’s the arm? Did they say how long you have to have the cast on? Are you stuck at home, or going out? Hunting or just doing research for Bobby? Tell me what you’re doing and I’ll tell you all about the joys of travelling with Dean._

_Speaking of which, Dean says hey._

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Hey Sam!_

_Dad told me about what went down with that trickster in Ohio. I laughed my ass off. I’m not sure if my favourite part was the slow dancing aliens or you and Dean at each other’s throats! It let the air out of Dean’s tires? You’re lucky he didn’t kill you then and there! :p_

_As for your last email, I can’t promise never to feel guilty when I’ve been an asshole, but I think I can manage being friends again. :)_

_My cast is on for at least six weeks, then I get another x-ray to see how well it’s healed. Dad is being a total drag. Which I guess shouldn’t really come as a surprise. He barely lets me go into town for groceries, let alone hunt. It’s given me a chance to sort out the library though. I’ve gotten everything back on the shelves now, and it’s much better organised. I’m going to catalogue them, but I haven’t decided on a system yet. There’s database software out there, but none of them has leapt out at me as the best option. I might have to program my own system, which should be fun._

_Wow. You guys are chasing monsters across America and here’s me nerding out about cataloguing. I have hit rock bottom. The cabin fever has set in. Send help._

_Ellie_

* * *

 

_Dear Ellie,_

_You’ve definitely gone crazy. Once you start talking about how much fun databases are, you have crossed a line. You’re past help. Bobby will just have to shoot you._

_We are in Nevada, looking into a haunting that only happens once a year. It should be coming up tomorrow night, and hopefully this year will be the last time. A ghostly woman appears on the highway every year, followed by a bloody man who chases her. Based on the date, we’ve figured out who they are. Trouble is, she was cremated and we’ve got no idea where he was buried, so it’s going to be a long night tomorrow, I guess._

_Dean says hi to you and to Bobby too._

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Sam,_

_Sorry I haven’t written sooner. I’ve just been waiting for something to happen to me. You don’t need twice daily emails from me about how itchy my cast is, or what I had for breakfast, or the always fascinating gossip of Sioux Falls. Maggie Newton is marrying some doctor out of New York, local prom queen makes good, alert the media. And oh my God, that freak Ellie Singer still lives out in that old junkyard with her drunk daddy. Some say she dropped out of college and joined a biker gang. Some say she’s wanted for murder in Canada. Either way, we can all agree she’s doing a lot of drugs and don’t got no man. :O_

_How did the thing in Nevada go? And how’s Dean? How is it travelling with Dean? After Ohio, Dad said he was surprised you two don’t try and kill one another more often. In that car all the time and sharing tiny motel rooms. Don’t you need your own space occasionally?_

_Oh, and I found a great cataloguing program that lets you input your own data fields! Even Dad can use it, although I won’t let him touch it while I’m doing the input. It’s great though, since all that bullshit about publishing company and date is not important for this particular collection. Year published: 1658, on real human skin, written in the blood of enemies. Instead, I’m able to sort by things that matter like what spells are in them and which creatures are described. I’m having so much fun._

_I really just wrote that. Look, Sam… I’d like to pretend it’s just being stuck at home that has me so excited about hours on end of data entry. But I think we both know I’m just a huge nerd. :p_

_Dad says “Hi, I guess.”_

_Ellie_

* * *

 

_Dear Ellie,_

_I was starting to wonder why I hadn’t heard from you. That’s exciting news about Madge Norman or whatever her name is. But tell me more about Ellie Singer. Biker gangs and Canadian crime sprees? She sounds awesome, even if she’s not engaged to a doctor._

_The Nevada thing went well, I suppose. Get this: she didn’t even know she was dead. It was actually really sad. I’ll tell you about it next time I see you._

_Dean is Dean. You know what he’s like. I think he’s doing okay, but it’s not like we talk it all out, you know? If he’s being a jerk, he’s probably fine. As for personal space… What’s that? It sounds great. I tend to go for a run or a walk every morning, to get a bit of time to myself. But to be honest, I don’t really feel like I need it that often. I’d rather be stuck in a motel room or car with Dean than go it alone, you know? He’s my brother._

_As for your cataloguing, it actually sounds really cool. I can just hear Bobby, though. I bet he’s very enthusiastic about you modernising his library…_

_I can’t even keep a straight face while typing that._

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Hi Sam!_

_Everything I do is always about hunting, I sometimes forget there’s a whole world full of people who don’t know what we know! I went to a wedding over the weekend, out in Green Bay (three whole nights away from Sioux Falls!). Just two of my friends from college. They got together in freshman year. Here’s the cliff notes: Cute couple, beautiful wedding, everyone was dressed up so nice, fabulous scenery, yes I cried._

_Anyway, it was so weird spending a weekend with regular folk just talking about their jobs and their love lives and their cats. Sure, I get that at home sometimes, but just in little doses, never all at once. I’ve been telling everyone I slipped on oil from a leaky engine. Which makes me sound clumsy and stupid, as opposed to “a demon snapped my arm” which is way more badass. :(_

_I’m rambling. My point is that it was kind of an odd weekend. All my friends have one career or another. They’re teachers and therapists and artists and nurses and stuff like that and they all seem happy. Some of them even felt sorry for me. Like I crashed and burned after college, just living with my Dad and scrapping cars. They think I’m missing out on so much._

_Funny thing is, I don’t feel like that at all. What we do is important, Sam, and I don’t care if no one knows we do it. Still matters. Besides… even if I did just do nothing but scrap cars, why would that matter? Someone has to. These white picket fence types are happy to sort their plastic and paper, but look down on the recycling I do!!!_

_I had a good time, for the most part, and they weren’t intentionally rude or anything. Just struck me as kind of funny how what I do is way more interesting then what they have going on, but no one will ever know it. Maybe that’s why they say Hunters can’t quit. If we try, we die of boredom!_

_Say hi to Dean,_

_Ellie_

* * *

 

_Dear Ellie,_

_Do you ever think we’re going about this the wrong way? We spend so much energy figuring out how to kill everything. But the things that we fight have to come from somewhere. Some of them are born and some of them are made. Some of them have to kill humans in order to live, but then, we kill other animals so that we can eat._

_I don’t know, Ellie. We hunt them and they hunt us, and did you ever just wonder if there is another way? A cure? I’ve seen vampires refuse to drink human blood. Maybe more would make that choice if we let them._

_Has anyone ever tried?_

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Dear Sam,_

_I hope you’re okay. If you ever want to ring and talk, I don’t mind. It doesn’t have to be important. It doesn’t even have to really be about anything._

_As to your question, I don’t really know. I’ve never thought about it before. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I read your last email._

_I guess it all comes down to the individual case. I’ve been asking myself whether I’d kill a vampire that wasn’t drinking human blood. I want to say no I wouldn’t. Because the whole point is protecting people, and if that vampire isn’t hurting anyone then what reason do I have to kill it? But then I think about myself. All the times I’ve cracked and broken when I was dieting. If that vampire cracks, someone will die and I could have prevented that. So, is the death my fault? Or is it on the vampire? Or do we share the blame?_

_Then again, a vampire who really wants to do the right thing has a lot more motivation to keep to that diet than I do. Perhaps I shouldn’t be judging their self-control based on how bad mine is._

_It got me thinking about ghosts, too. Vengeful spirits are often murder victims. They aren’t to blame for the way they died, and often while I’m researching a case I feel real sympathy for them. But, what they’ve become in death is something different and it’s harmful to people who are also innocent. I often wish there was an easier way to stop a vengeful spirit. Wish I could reason with it and make it see how it’s doing to others what was done to it._

_We can’t risk people’s lives. That’s why we hunt. I guess for me that has to be the bottom line. “Will this risk a human life?”_

_Tell Dean hi,_

_Ellie._

* * *

_Dear Ellie,_

_Sorry about my last email and thanks for your reply. I’m fine, really. I just have some stuff on my mind, but that’s obvious. I never replied to what you said in your previous email, or asked how you were doing. Shouldn’t it be time to get your cast off soon? You’ve got to be looking forward to that._

_How is the catalogue going? How’s Bobby? What are you going to do when you get your cast off? Run straight out and kill a poltergeist?_

_As for us, we’re in LA. Dean insists we should take a break and enjoy ourselves, but I’m pretty sure there’s a job here. Guy got killed on a movie set and there’s a lot of rumours about it being haunted. I think it’s worth checking out, and Dean’s not about to say no to a trip to Warner Brothers studios, so we’re going to look into it tomorrow. Did you know Dean’s a huge movie buff? He loves horror films, which I don’t really get. We live that stuff every day. Sometimes I wish I could get such enjoyment out of simple stuff like movies or music, the way Dean does. We’re just different people._

_It’s nearly 2am. I better try and get some sleep, in case this haunting rumour turns out to be a case. Either way, I’ll get a postcard for you. I know you don’t have one from LA._

_Sam_

* * *

_Dear Sam,_

_Another week with the cast and then I get the x-ray to see if they can take it off. I have been angelically good and done everything I was told, so I deserve to have it removed. Probably won’t go out and gank a poltergeist right away, but I’ve definitely got an appointment with the punching bag. I want to see what six weeks of healing can do!_

_Dad is great. He’s just doing what he does. Answering phones, ripping apart cars, looking for obscure occult books, drinking whiskey and treating me like I’m made of glass. The usual. I asked him if he wanted me to write anything from him. He said “If Sam wants to hear from me, he’ll call me. He don’t need me emailing him kisses.”_

_Dean likes horror movies, huh? I don’t mind some of them, but mostly they irritate me. I find all the characters annoying and I end up rooting for the monster half the time. These idiots are always reading from the mystical book or going into the abandoned hospital. Then one of them says “maybe we should split up” and I just want to strangle them! If Dean can recommend any that won’t piss me off, we can watch them next time you’re here. I bet Dad would like nothing better than the three of us taking over the library all night. :)_

_I hope you’ve been getting enough sleep. I won’t lecture you about how important it is, since you’re a big boy now. Thanks for the promise of a postcard. I’ll scout out some space on the wall._

_Ellie_

* * *

_Dear Ellie,_

_Well, it was a case. This disgruntled horror writer was summoning ghosts to murder anyone he thought had ruined his movie script. They turned on him and killed him. I guess if it was a movie, you’d have been annoyed by it._

_We also discovered that Dean has missed his calling. Four days in Hollywood and he starts speaking the lingo. He never had so much fun undercover. I’m pretty sure if he stayed there, he would work his way up to studio executive within a few years._

_You better find space for more than one postcard, since we’ve stopped in five nothing towns the past two days, and I got you something from each one. Until I started looking, I never knew how many tiny towns printed their own postcards, but it seems like you’re not a real highway town unless you sell postcards with a picture of the local scenery and an old weatherboard church on them._

_We’re at the Roadhouse tonight. Ellen has calmed down about what happened with Jo. Do you hear from Jo much? I can tell her mother misses her, although she didn’t say anything directly. I told her I was writing to you and she said to tell you hello and that she loves you. Ash also says hi and had a lot of questions about how you are and what you’ve been doing._

_Good luck with the x-ray,_

_Sam_

* * *

_Sam,_

_You see ash agian, you can tell him to mind his own business. let me make something real clekar to you right now, winchester. i got tmie for tgwo kindzs of men: one good night and happily ever after. I ain’t messing around with anyone who messed arond ian the gray area. ghe had his chance. this is some bullshit._

_ellie_

* * *

 

_Dear Ellie,_

_Wow._

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Dear Sam,_

_So, I might have been pretty drunk when I got your last email, and even drunker when I replied. Sorry about that. Obviously, I have time for many kinds of men, including men who are my friends. Like you and Dean. I hope you didn’t think I meant you guys. I would never mean you guys. :)_

_Well, I’m hugely embarrassed so I’m just gonna move on real quick and tell you that after the x-ray they said I have to keep the cast on ten days, so that’s annoying. I’ve finished all the cataloguing now, which is great. It means I can get back out there once my arm heals, without a half-finished job lingering over me._

_What took you to Nebraska anyway? Has Ash had any luck tracking those omens for you?_

_I’m rearranging the postcards so I have a whole section for the ones you are bringing me. I’ll call it “The Wall of Winchester Wanderings.” I am as poetic as I am hilarious. :)_

_Love Ellie_

* * *

 

_Dear Ellie,_

_No, Ash hasn’t found anything significant yet, but he thinks the program is definitely working, so we’ll just have to keep waiting. We stopped by the Roadhouse because we were only a few hours away and it seemed like as good a place as any to stop. We were hoping Ellen might know of a case._

_Now we’re headed to Arkansas. An old marine buddy of our dad’s wants us to look into something. If you don’t hear from us for a while, don’t worry about it. This case is in a prison, and Dean is pretty sure the only way to deal with it is to get arrested. I’m not happy about it, but Dean insists. I hope we can find another way._

_I’ll write again when I can. I hope your cast comes off soon._

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Dear Sam,_

_So, you’re both wanted on murder and bank robbery charges and you’re just going to get yourselves arrested? In Arkansas. And just hope for the best? Yeah. I’m definitely going to worry._

_Ellie_

* * *

 

_Dear Ellie,_

_Everything went fine. Or as fine as anything ever goes for us. We are headed back up your way, so we might see you in a week or two. It depends on where we find cases. I’ll have some stories to tell you, and I’m still collecting postcards._

_You must have the cast off now. How does it feel? Possibly one of the greatest feelings in the world is finally getting to scratch once you get a cast off._

_Dean says hey._

_Sam_

* * *

 

_Dear Sam,_

_The cast is off!!! You are definitely right about scratching! I’ve never been so excited to scratch in my life! Better than sex, no question! :) :) :)_

_Everything seems pretty good. My arm can do everything it’s supposed to and I can throw a punch without snapping it again, but I’ll probably wait a few weeks before I go looking for trouble, just to make sure it’s absolutely healed up._

_I imagined all sorts of awful scenarios about a case inside a prison and what you two were doing. Plus horrible dreams about you both getting the death penalty. So I really look forward to seeing you and hearing what really happened._

_Tell Dean hey back,_

_Love Ellie_


	10. Chapter 10: MIA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sam disappears, Dean calls Bobby and Ellie for help.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 2x21

I was woken by a loud noise. Kicking back the covers in alarm, my first thought was that it was the smoke alarm in the kitchen. Then I realised it was just the phone. Not my cell, but one of the landlines downstairs. I lay in the dark a moment to see if I could hear my father getting up to answer it, but no such luck. With a groan, I forced myself out of bed, and rubbed my face, taking a moment to get a quick look at the clock. 1am. No one calls at 1am unless it’s an emergency.

I hurried out into the hall and down the stairs quick as I could. We had several landlines, so that Dad could pose as various government officials for hunters needing help with a cover identity. This was our personal number, though. I nearly slipped as I ran to answer it.

“Hello?” I asked, leaning sloppily against the kitchen bench.

On the other end, I heard the very panicked voice of Dean Winchester. “Ellie? Is that you? Where’s Bobby?”

“He’s asleep, Dean.” I tried to speak calmly, hoping that whatever had him panicked, a soothing tone from me would help. “It’s one in the morning. What’s going on? Do you need help?”

“It’s Sam!” he said, an edge of hysteria to his voice. “He’s missing.”

I stood up straighter, shocked and nervous. The last time Sam had gone missing, he’d been possessed. He’d attacked Jo, traumatising her pretty badly, and then come straight for me. We all know how that went down.

“What… what kind of missing?” I asked.

“Missing missing!” shouted Dean. “He was there and then he wasn’t. Dead bodies, sulphur… Something’s got him, Ellie.”

“A demon?” I asked. “You think he’s possessed again?”

“I dunno,” said Dean. “Bobby gave us those anti-possession charms, so maybe not… And anyway, if he was possessed he’d still have to walk away. He just disappeared.”

He was right. Meg had been possessing Sam, but she still had to steal a car. The way Dean was talking, it sounded like his brother had just vanished into thin air. What could do that? Yet the sulphur suggested demons. This was a mystery well beyond my knowledge.

“Okay,” I said. “Just… can you wait five minutes? I’ll wake Dad.”

While my father was talking to Dean, I started gathering stuff together. I packed a couple of changes of clothes for me, and a bag for Dad as well. Carrying them both downstairs, I went into the library to think about what we might need. Since we didn’t know what had taken Sam or how, it was hard to judge. I grabbed the maps Dad used to track demonic omens and rolled them up to put in the car.

Dean was about eight hours away, but Dad suggested he drive towards us while we headed towards him. That would bring us together in half the time. While Dad was downstairs picking out weapons, I fixed my phone to put both Dean and Sam’s numbers on speed dial, and started to pack up the truck. It was only then that I remembered I was not dressed. I ran upstairs to change and by the time I came down, Dad was ready to go.

Less than twenty minutes after Dean called, we were in the truck, headed out of the yard.

* * *

Dawn was breaking when Dean called from outside Des Moines. I told him to pull over somewhere safe on the highway and we’d be there within the hour. I eventually spotted him about ten minutes out of town. He’d pulled the Impala off into a wide patch of dirt, and it seemed like a reasonably inconspicuous place to meet. Dad pulled the truck over behind him and I jumped out.

I ran to Dean to give him a hug, but he wasn’t really there as he held me. I squeezed him tight, though, to let him know that I cared about him. It’s not the sort of thing you say to Dean, so I had to communicate it physically somehow.

He’d already told Dad the full story over the phone, and he’d repeated it to me during the drive, so there was no sense in making him go over it again. Dad came over with the maps I’d packed, and with a brief pat on the back for Dean, he rolled them out on the bonnet of the Impala.

“I’ve called Ash,” Dean said, walking over to meet Dad. “He’s looking into omens that might explain this.”

Dad gestured to the map. “This is it,” he said. “All demonic signs and omens over the past month.”

Dean looked up at him, as though he were mad. “Are you joking? There’s nothing here.”

“Exactly,” said Dad.

Although I knew there was nothing to see, I went to stand next to Dean. I wasn’t just tagging along with my father. Whatever happened, I wanted to help, and I was going to be in on the conversation, even if it was pointless.

“Well there’s gotta be something,” Dean insisted. “What about the… the… the normal low-level stuff?” He turned to me, as though I might have answers Dad didn’t. “You know, exorcisms, that kind of thing.”

I shook my head. “It’s been totally quiet. Like… suspiciously quiet.”

“Well how are we supposed to look for Sam? What do we just close our eyes and point?”

I was about to tell him that I didn’t know, when Dean’s phone rang. He picked it up quickly and just for a second I hoped it was Sam, but I was disappointed immediately.

“Ash, what do you got?” he asked. There was a pause. “Oh, come on, man! You’ve gotta give us something! We’re looking at a three thousand mile haystack here.” He rolled his eyes at me and I did my best to show sympathy with just my face. “Well what? Come on, I don’t have time for this!”

After another long pause, Dean pulled the phone away from his ear and hung up. “I guess we’re going to the Roadhouse,” he said. “Come on.”

He was walking towards the driver’s seat of his car, but I called out. “What did Ash say?”

“He won’t tell me over the phone,” said Dean, irritation in every syllable. “But he says it’s important.”

I frowned. “You want me to ride with you?”

“If you want,” he said, but that was what I had expected. Dean was never going to ask me for company or sympathy. I looked up at my father and he nodded, before rolling up the map.

I ran around to the passenger side door and opened up to slide into the seat. Sam’s seat. Dean didn’t even wait for me to put on the seat belt before roaring out onto the highway.

Dean had his music turned up extremely loud. I took that as a sign that he didn’t want to talk and that was fine. I certainly wasn’t going to force him. But if he wanted me, I was there. I looked out the window for the first twenty minutes, but then I got my phone out. It was worth giving Sam another try.

I didn’t need to ask Dean for quiet to hear that I was getting the out of service signal again. It was impossible to say if Sam’s phone had been turned off, or broken or just taken into an area with no reception. As I put the cell back in my shorts pocket, Dean finally looked over at me for a moment. I shook my head.

He sighed and turned down the music. It was still clearly audible, but I could hear him over it.

“Thanks for coming, Ellie. After what happened the last time…”

“Of course we came,” I said. “And it won’t be like last time. Even if, you know…”

Even if something had possessed Sam, I wouldn’t be fooled again. That’s what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t figure out the right way to say the words. This time I wasn’t alone, and I was prepared for the possibility that when we found Sam’s body, it wouldn’t necessarily be Sam inside it.

“You should look down next to the seat,” said Dean.

Surprised by that suggestion, and not knowing what to expect, I reached down into the space beside me. Something flat and hard was stuffed down there, but carefully. It was easy to retrieve, and I was careful not to crumple it, as the intention had obviously been to keep it where it would stay flat.

It was an A4 envelope, folded in half. Looking at Dean with curiosity, I unfolded it and put my hand inside. I felt small pieces of hard cardboard and I realised what they must be just as I pulled them out of the envelope.

The first postcard showed a picture of the Hollywood sign, splattered on the hills. It was surrounded by a red border and bright yellow letters on the bottom labelled the postcard “Los Angeles, California”, as if there were another, more famous Los Angeles in Kansas or somewhere, for me to get confused.

My hand flew involuntarily to my mouth as I looked at it. It was instinct, a way to physically hold in my tears. I had been trying to avoid thinking about what danger Sam might be in. That he might already be dead. With a sniff, I put the card to the back and looked at the next. The next stop had been Flagstaff, Arizona. The card was divided into four pictures, showcasing some old buildings at Northern Arizona University, a meteor crater, some attractive snow-capped mountains and a beautiful view from Walnut Canyon.

Next was the town of Highrock, New Mexico, which really was barely a town at all. The information on the back of the postcard said that the population was 1200, and the only scenic photograph they’d managed to find was apparently “Highrock Main Street, c. 1902”.

All up, Sam had collected thirteen postcards for me, as evidence of the boys’ drive across the southern states, through Texas and Oklahoma to Arkansas, before moving up through Missouri to Illinois, which is where they’d been when Sam disappeared.

“He must have remembered in every town,” I muttered to myself.

“Huh?” asked Dean.

I put the postcards back into the envelope and folded it over. At first I just rested it on my knees, but I found myself still clutching it with one hand, reluctant to let go of the gifts my friend had gathered for me.

“You like ‘em?” asked Dean.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah… They’re great.”

Neither of us said anything for several minutes. There was nothing but the heavy drums and complex guitar of Led Zeppelin. I stared out the window and Dean focused on the road.

Finally, in a break between songs, I turned my head to talk to Dean. “He’s gotta be alive, Dean. If something wanted to kill him, it’d just kill him, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I keep thinking.”

“Okay. So… we’ll see what Ash knows and we’ll find him.”

“Right,” Dean agreed.

I turned back to the window.

* * *

As soon as we turned in to park at the Roadhouse, we could see something was very wrong. Where I expected to see the friendly but dishevelled old building, there was nothing but black ruins. I gasped as Dean stopped the car suddenly.

The Roadhouse had burnt to the ground. There was barely even a shell of it left. The roof and walls were just rubble. As Dean got out of the car, I just stared at it, frozen to my seat. There was nothing but charcoal left behind. Everything was black. Surely Aunt Ellen couldn’t have been in there. And Ash? What about him? Jo hadn’t been home in months. At least she would be okay. Except she wouldn’t, because whatever disagreement she may have had with her mother, she wouldn’t be able to bear this.

I just managed to register my Dad passing the Impala. He was running up to look closer at the debris with Dean. It shook me enough to help me move again, and I opened my door to get out.

“Oh my God,” Dad was saying.

“Aunt Ellen…” I said, but the words barely came out. It was more a series of choking sounds.

There were at least three bodies among the rubble. They were burned and blackened, and I didn’t know how to tell who they were. Any of them might have been Ellen or Ash. I went over to one, picking my way across the rubble. The only identifiable thing about it was military dog-tags around the neck. That wasn’t Ellen, or Ash either, but it might have been any Hunter. A lot of them were ex-military types, like John Winchester.

Dean had bent down in the charcoal just as I had. He grabbed at something in the rubble and then pulled his hand back suddenly. “Oh Ash… Dammit!”

I stood back up and rushed over to him. Seeing me coming, he shook his head. “Ellie, don’t…”

But he was too late to stop me. The watch glinting in the sunlight beside him was familiar. It definitely belonged to Ash. It was still attached to something. I could barely call it a body. It was just a blackened mass in the vague shape of a human.

I felt sick, and my hand flew to my mouth. Fortunately, I hadn’t eaten since the previous night and though my oesophagus muscles did spasm, there was nothing for me to vomit. A small amount of bile caught in my throat. I turned away from the sight of Ash’s body, coughing on the slime in my mouth. Dean thumped me on the back twice, and that got it out. After that, his hand stayed on my back for a moment.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. He came around in front of me and offered a hand, helping me to get to my feet. I needed it; just that little extra pull.

Dad had finished surveying the scene, and came over to join us.

“Ellen?” I asked.

He shook his head and I felt a moment of joy before it faded away. Just because none of the corpses was obviously Ellen, that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Where else would she have been?

I grabbed my father, and he put both arms around me. He held me for a moment. “This is…” But he didn’t have the words to describe what it was.

“What the Hell did Ash know?” asked Dean. “We’ve got no way of knowing where Ellen is. Or if she’s even alive. We’ve got no clue what Ash was gonna tell us. Now, how the Hell are we gonna find Sam?”

Letting go of Dad, I felt a moment of intense anger. Ash was definitely dead, Ellen almost certainly. But Dean’s main take-away was that Ash could not now help him find Sam.

I was about to call Dean out on that, when my brain stopped me. That wasn’t fair. Of course he was upset about Sam. He didn’t know Ellen or Ash like I did, and Sam was the only family he had. He’d had it drummed into him since he was four years old that his brother was his responsibility. In any case, I cared about Sam, and wherever he was, whatever was happening, he was still in danger. The folks lying in the debris of the Roadhouse were not coming back.

So, instead of yelling at Dean, I took a deep breath, and stepped forward to put my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find him,” I said.

It looked like he was about to answer me, but instead he clutched at his head, his face screwing up with pain.

“Dean?”

I tightened my grip on his shoulder, grabbing the other as well. He clutched onto me, and I had to move my feet to stabilise myself and hold his weight. Dad came over and helped me move him towards his car. Maybe we could help him to sit down.

But he suddenly looked up at me, and his green eyes looked normal and pain free.

“What was that?” asked Dad.

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “A headache.”

“Hell of a headache,” I said. “That happen often?” I’d seen a Lifetime movie about a lady with a brain tumour once, and the actress did exactly what Dean had done.

“No,” said Dean. “Must be the stress. I could have sworn I saw something.”

Dad looked at him with what was either suspicion or something very similar. “What do you mean? A vision? Like what Sam gets?”

Dean looked up immediately, anger in his eyes. “What? No!”

“I’m just saying,” Dad said.

“Come on! I’m not some psychic!”

It didn’t seem a good time to point out that Sam was some psychic, and he probably wouldn’t appreciate the vehemence with which Dean tried to distance himself. Then, all of a sudden, like God himself was trying to prove Dean wrong, he fell backwards, crying out with pain.

I grabbed hold of him to stop him falling down entirely, hoping this burst of pain would be as brief as the last one. After maybe thirty seconds, he started to steady himself, pulling away from me. I tried to keep hold of him, concerned he’d fall, but he obviously didn’t want me taking care of him.

“Are you alright?” I asked, as he held up a hand to stop me coming towards him again.

“Yeah, I think so. I saw Sam.”

“So… it _was_  a vision?” I asked, warily. Dean already seemed agitated enough. I didn’t want to piss him off by suggesting he was a full-blown psychic.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I don’t know how, but yeah.” He let a big breath. “That was about as fun as getting kicked in the jewels.”

“Did you just see Sam?” I asked. “He’s alive?”

Dean nodded. “I think he is. There was, uh… a bell?”

“What kind of bell?” asked Dad.

Dean shrugged. “Like… a big bell, with some kind of engraving on it, I dunno.”

A big engraved bell? I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Was it symbolic of something? Or was it an actual physical thing that existed, maybe near Sam?

“Was it a tree?” Dad asked. “Like, an oak tree?”

Dean stared at him in surprise. “Yeah! Exactly.”

Dad nodded. “I know where Sam is.”


	11. Chapter 11: Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean, Ellie and Bobby find Sam, but they’re too late.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 2x21 and 2x22

There ain’t nothing my Dad doesn’t know about hauntings. Dean’s description of a large bell engraved with an oak tree was familiar to him. There was a bell just like that in Cold Oak, South Dakota. It was famous as the most haunted town in America, and as soon as my father mentioned it, I remembered it too. The old frontier town was so haunted that everyone in the place had packed up and left, leaving it a literal ghost town. If Sam was in Cold Oak, he had been just over an hour from our house all the time.

I only went back into the Impala to get my postcards. I wanted those with me, but I could tell Dean would rather be alone. That was okay with me. I was used to long road trips with my Dad.

“You okay, Ellie?” Dad asked me, as we pulled back onto the highway.

I didn’t really know. My worry about Sam had eased somewhat, thanks to Dean’s vision. I was still devastated at the thought that Aunt Ellen was dead. I was also holding out a little hope that she wasn’t and feeling stupid for it. But how could I call Jo and tell her when I wasn’t certain? What if I were wrong? On top of that, I had a lot of feelings about Ash and I didn’t quite understand all of them.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

He knew me well enough not to try and push me. If I wanted to talk about what had happened, I would. Instead, he just focused on the drive, while I looked out the window at the flat scenery. Trees and trees and telephone lines. Sometimes I was thinking about Aunt Ellen, and other times about Sam. Then thoughts of Ash would drift into my mind and I would push them away, deep down. They were too hard, too raw and too complicated for me to deal with. We would find Sam first. Maybe he could even be the one to help me make sense of them.

At the state border, Dad began to get tired. Normally, he hated me to drive while he was in the truck, but he was just too exhausted to drive safely. He’d already driven twelve hours in one day, and we’d started out at almost two in the morning. I rang Dean to say we needed to pull over, and as I swapped seats with Dad, I could see him in the Impala, jumpy and irritated. Quick as I could, I took over the wheel. Surely Dean was exhausted. He’d been looking for Sam longer than we had, and he didn’t have another driver to switch with. But I supposed he couldn’t sleep anyway. Not while he was worrying about his little brother.

* * *

It took us another couple of hours to get to Cold Oak. Dad had muttered to me to wake him when I got on the right highway, and I did. He had enough time to get his bearings before directing me onto a deserted back road. I checked behind me to make sure Dean was following. He was, and he stayed close to me as I accelerated along the barren stretch of road.

Another turn and a few miles after that, I had to pull over. The road ended abruptly, and a deep ditch was overgrown with tough, woody weeds. Dean pulled up alongside us, and we all surveyed the terrain.

“Well, it looks like the rest of the way is on foot,” said Dad.

Dean went to the back of the Impala while Dad and I went into the truck for our guns. I grabbed the torch as well, but Dean had a spare for Dad to use. With a shotgun and a torch each, we began to make our way across the ditch. As if the dark were not bad enough, it was also raining. Within four steps, my boot had sunk down into a muddy bog, but I just pulled it back out and kept moving.

It didn’t take all that long to get to the abandoned town, just a few minutes at most. It was a wet and messy walk, but not an arduous one. Dean led the way, and his long purposeful strides were hard to keep up with. I had to hurry, Dad staying behind me and checking over his shoulder occasionally, just in case. Even if we were right that Sam was there, we still didn’t know what had taken him or what else might be there.

A few strides ahead of me, Dean saw him first. “Sam!” he yelled out, and I rushed forward to see him too.

It was Sam, alright, wet and tired looking, but definitely him. He called back to Dean as he stumbled towards us. Trying to take in his appearance and figure out what had been happening to him, I didn’t notice the other guy. He was wearing a military uniform and by the time I saw him, he was right behind Sam, a knife in his hand. I didn’t know who he was or why he was there, but I understood enough to scream out to Sam, at the same time as Dean.

But it was too late. He plunged the knife into Sam’s back just as we started to run. As we reached them, Sam fell to his knees and the man who had stabbed him turned and fled. I had a split second to decide, so as Dean stopped in front of Sam, I kept running. I could hear Dad’s slightly laboured breaths behind me, as I ran at full speed towards Sam’s attacker. I chased him all along the muddy streets of Cold Oak, past abandoned wooden buildings, out into a field. I chased him long after my father gave up. I dropped my torch and kept running, just wishing I had taken some kind of hand gun instead of the shotgun. I needed something I didn’t have to stop and steady myself to fire.

I guess I should have figured from his military uniform that the guy would be fitter than me. After the pain of a stitch dug into my left side, I tried to keep running. I tried to push myself, but I couldn’t. I reached my limit and collapsed into the muddy field.

It seemed like forever as I lay on my back, looking up at the starry sky above me. It was wet and cloudy, but I could still see some stars, twinkling through the cloud cover. I listened to the sound of my own breath as I lay there, struggling to get enough air into my lungs, my whole torso aching from the pain of pushing myself too hard and too far. Finally, the pain started to subside and I was able to force myself back onto my feet. I looked back at the rotting wood of the town, frowning. I had to go back… But I didn’t want to.

When I got back, I would know for sure whether Sam had survived that knife in his back. I would know whether we had arrived just seconds too late to save him from death. As soon as I got back to Cold Oak, I’d know. And I didn’t want to know. The longer it took me to walk back across the field and into town, the longer I could believe that Sam was going to be okay.

But I couldn’t stay out in the field. Sooner or later, Dad would come and get me and I would know regardless. Besides which, what if Sam  _was_  okay? I was just putting myself through unnecessary doubt and worry. I didn’t see exactly where he’d been stabbed. He might have been hurt, but okay. Winchesters survived all kinds of injuries that would kill anyone else. Standing out in that field, I might have been delaying Sam’s journey to hospital. What if they waited for me?

So, for better or worse, I started to make my way back across the field. It took me ten minutes to walk, quick as I could without reigniting the burning chest pain. I picked up my torch on the way through the field, and kept going, back to the street where I had last seen Dad. I followed it back around the corner until I saw them.

Dean, crumpled in the mud and holding a lifeless Sam, Dad standing over them. With tears beginning to sting my eyes, I slung the gun over my shoulder and kept the torch beam at my feet, so I could be sure I didn’t trip and fall on my way back.

I finally reached Dad, and I lay my gun on the ground beside his. He looked into my eyes as I straightened up and put his arm around my shoulder. I shook my head.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He was so fast.”

Dad’s only response was to squeeze me close to him, and drop a quick kiss on top of my head. We stood looking down at Dean, desperately clinging to his brother’s corpse, as though it might somehow bring him back. I was sure he was thinking about Sam, but he was thinking of me, too. Watching someone mourn the death of their only family definitely brought to mind how important my own family was to me. All I had was my father, and he had no one but me. The nearest thing either of us had were Sam and Dean. They had always called Dad “Uncle Bobby”, and that made them near as cousins to me.

And now Sam was gone. I remembered two Sams, and I would miss both of them. There was the little boy, shorter than me, even though he was just one year younger. He’d draw with me on the floor. He’d look at my postcards and point them out, showing me that he’d been to this place or that one. He borrowed my books and read them through in a day, talking about them afterwards and asking me my opinion. He was so good at hide and go seek, but he didn’t know the scrapyard like I did, and I could always find some little nook to test him and make him work to catch me. He didn’t laugh at me when I admitted, blushing, that I had a crush on a boy from school. He was my sometimes friend, the brother who came occasionally and unexpectedly, but every time it was like we hadn’t been apart.

Then there was grown up Sam. Eight years older, he seemed to be twice as tall the last time I saw him. Broad across the shoulders, with a handsome face, and a kind one. When he smiled, deep dimples formed in his cheeks. His eyes had so much kindness in them, but so much sadness too. I hadn’t known him again a full year, but it felt like we were best friends again. We’d talked about the kind of real shit my father and Dean didn’t want to know about. We’d gotten drunk together, the way we should have done as teenagers, if only we hadn’t been separated by that still mysterious feud between our fathers. We had emailed, back and forth for months, silly and serious and sweet. And he’d started collecting postcards for me. Once he got the first, he hadn’t stopped, thinking of me and my collection in every town he stopped in, however tiny.

He was dead.

I cried into Dad’s shoulder for I don’t know how long. Finally, he let me go, and I looked at his face, not knowing what I should do next. But he knew. He tilted his head, just a little, pointing me in Dean’s direction.

I nodded. This was not a thing Dad was good at. He could love hard and deeply. But he didn’t always know how to express that. He could just about manage it with his daughter, but everyone else was a stretch. I handed him my torch.

Getting down onto my knees, I very softly and cautiously put a hand to Dean’s back. He was still clutching onto Sam, holding him close as if love could save him. When I touched him, he did not flinch or move away from me, but he didn’t let Sam go, either. I let my hand spread out across his jacket, increasing the surface area of my touch. He let me. I moved my hand a little, slowly at first, rubbing it down his back, then back up.

Up and down, in smooth, soft circles, I ran my hand over his back, listening to him breathe.

“Dean,” I whispered, after several minutes.

It was then that he looked up. He wouldn’t let go, but he looked up and into my eyes, not ashamed to be crying. I kept rubbing his back, as I spoke gently to him. “I think we need to move him inside,” I said.

He seemed to take a moment to understand me, his eyes dead and cold, he almost looked through me. Finally, he nodded.

“Do you want help to carry him?”

“No!” He was suddenly entirely present and in the moment, popping out of whatever grey, grief-stricken place he had been, just to make his feelings clear to me.

“Okay,” I said, soothingly. “That’s okay. Why don’t you pick him up and I’ll make sure you have a good place to put him.”

“Okay,” he said.

* * *

While I had been sitting with Dean, Dad had found a safe building for us to stop and regroup. It was just a crappy frontier house, with a couple of rooms, but there was an old mattress in there and it seemed like a good place to put Sam’s body. I figured Dean would feel better about letting him go if he looked comfortable and peaceful.

For a long while he just sat beside Sam, completely silent, but no long crying either. I just sat with him, a short distance away. I was there if he wanted me. Dad had gone back to the truck and fetched a change of clothes for all three of us. He insisted I get some sleep, so I crumpled up my old clothes to use as a pillow and lay down in the other room, while Dad and Dean stayed with Sam.

Dad woke me in the bright morning, and I was almost disgusted by what I saw out the window. The rain of the previous night was gone, and the sun shone hot and warm. There was bird song. They didn’t even care that Sam was dead. Ash and Ellen too.

There was a bucket of chicken, but I wasn’t hungry. I took it over to Dean. He had moved from his seat beside Sam, but he was standing in the doorway still, looking down at him.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“You should eat something,” I said.

“I said I’m fine.” His voice was dead and flat, like all his emotion had died along with his brother.

He pushed past me and into the other room, where my father was pacing. I followed him in, only to see him take a huge swig from a whiskey bottle. It was the last thing he should have been doing on an empty stomach, but I didn’t want to tell him.

“Dean,” said Dad. “I hate to bring this up, I really do. But don’t you think maybe it’s time… we bury Sam?”

“No.” Dean said it with such finality and certainty that I thought Dad was kinda crazy to keep going, but he did.

“We could… maybe…”

“What? Torch his corpse?” asked Dean. He gave a slight shake of his head. “Not yet.”

Dad looked over at me, silently asking me for help. Leaving the chicken on the table, I came over to them. “Dean, why don’t you come home with us?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Dean, please,” said Dad.

Finally, Dean snapped. “Why don’t you cut me some slack?”

“We just don’t want you to be alone,” I said.

“And we could use your help,” Dad added, looking over Dean’s head at me. I could see how worried he was.

Dean’s only answer was a derisive snort.

“Something big is going down,” Dad reminded him. “End of the world big.”

“Well then let it end!” Dean yelled.

There was silence. Dad stared at him. I stared at him. Then Dad looked to me. I sighed and came closer to Dean. I didn’t think a hand on the shoulder would be a good idea this time, no matter how gentle.

“Dean, you don’t mean that,” I said. “You just…”

But before I could say anything more, Dean was on his feet. “You don’t think so, huh?” He yelled into my face, towering over me. He was a good six inches taller. “You don’t think I’ve given enough, Ellie? You don’t think I’ve paid enough? I’m done with it! All of it! And if you know what’s good for you, you will get the hell out of here!”

I backed across the room as he yelled at me, too surprised to hold my ground. I knew it wasn’t him. His aggression was coming from a place of sadness and desperation. He would regret yelling at me later. I was cautious of his anger, but I wasn’t hurt by it. His physical intimidation didn’t worry me. I didn’t think any amount of grief would ever cause him to actually hit me.

It was too much for my father though. He had come up behind Dean and forcibly turned him around. Dean reacted instinctively, shoving him back slightly, but Dad didn’t let it get further than that.

“I don’t care what you’re feeling, boy. You don’t threaten my daughter.”

It was enough to shock Dean back into himself. He stared at my father for a moment, as though he didn’t understand, before releasing a great sigh. He turned back to me.

“I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m sorry. But can you both please… please just go.”

I nodded, and did the best that I could to smile, to show him that I forgave him. Picking up my bag, I grabbed my father’s arm and walked with him towards the door. “You know where we are,” I said. “Okay?”

Dean didn’t reply, but I knew better than to take it personally. I followed Dad out of the room and into the street. With the mud all dried up and plenty of light, it would not take us long to get back to the truck. At least we were only an hour from home, and if Dean needed us, he could quickly reach us.

“You okay, kid?” asked Dad.

I forced the biggest smile that I could. “Of course. He’d have to yell louder than that to bother me.”

“That ain’t what I meant,” said Dad.

I knew what he meant. But I wasn’t ready to talk about that. Maybe when we got home and I’d had a chance to go up to my room and cry by myself for a while. But not yet.


	12. Chapter 12: Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has been crying for hours, but then she gets some good news and more good news. Then very very bad news.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 2x22

The wet pillow was cold and sticky against my face, but I didn’t have the energy left to move. Every time I thought I’d stopped crying, I was hit again. It was like a shockwave, making my body shake and washing over me so the tears started as a sore spot in my stomach, rising up through my aching chest and into my throat before reaching my eyes. They’d sit in my eyes for a moment, hanging on my lashes as I shook and then out they would pour, accompanied by an ugly, strangled shriek from my mouth. Dad hadn’t bothered me. He must have known I needed to get my cry out. If he’d come in, I wouldn’t have been able to string a sentence together anyway.

Finally, I found the breath to roll over and sit upright. The little pile of postcards was sitting on the side table, where I had left it after the last time. I picked them up yet again. Los Angeles, California: that was the first. I ran a shaking hand over it, barely able to see the picture. I could only tell that it was the Hollywood sign because I’d seen it before.

The postcards were all I’d been able to look at so far. I never deleted an email, so I knew there were a ton waiting for me to read. And I would read them again, over and over obsessively, like a crazy woman. Emails from Ellen and Sam… even a few from Ash. I would get to them eventually, I knew that. But for now, that took too much energy. It took everything I had just to sit and look at the postcards, crying and making awful noises, snotty-nosed and red-eyed.

As I sat looking at the pictures of Flagstaff, there was a knock at my door. Dad had finally come up to see if I was alright.

“Go away!” I called.

“Ellie, I gotta talk to you.”

I was about to yell again, be like Dean and just shout that I wanted to be alone and go away and stop caring about me. But I remembered that there was still something serious going on. Sam had been taken for a reason and it can’t have been a good one. That man who had stabbed him had gotten away, thanks to me. And it seemed likely that whatever Ash had known led to the whole Roadhouse being torched. I didn’t have time to keep crying. I needed to help.

“Fine, come in!” I called.

He didn’t need telling twice. My father came in, shutting the door after him. “Ellie… we got visitors.”

“Who?” I asked. My first thought was something hostile, demons maybe. But he would have just shouted for me, were that the case.

He came over and sat beside me on the bed. “Dean’s here. But, Ellie… he brought Sam.”

I realised that Dad must have been worried about me, dealing with Sam’s body in the house. The thought didn’t bother me, though. He was dead either way, no matter where his corpse was.

“He wants to torch him here?” I asked.

Dad shook his head. “No, Ellie… Uh… Sam’s alive.”

I stared at him for a moment. I understood the words he had said. I knew what they all meant and together they made a complete sentence. But something about them just wouldn’t go into my head. I wasn’t hearing him right.

“What do you mean he’s… he was dead… I saw him dead…”

Dad sighed. “Dean’s done some damn fool thing, I don’t know what. I’ll find out. But looks like Sam doesn’t realise he died.”

I knew there were a few ways to save a person from death, but none of them were smart. You don’t get something for nothing, so whatever Dean had done, there were sure to be consequences. It’s not okay to cheat death. I found myself not glad to hear Sam was alive at all. Was what came back really Sam? And for how long would we have him? Or would the price come out of Dean?

“What does he think happened?” I asked, nervously.

Dad shook his head. “I don’t know what Dean told him. But play along until I can get to the bottom of this, okay.”

I looked over at the mirror. I still had tears in my eyes and the whole top half of my face looked puffy and red. It was obvious I had been crying, but that didn’t have to matter. After all, plenty of my tears had been for Ellen and Ash. I took a deep breath.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

As Dad left, I quickly wiped away the excess tears and took a few more slow, deep breaths. If Sam and Dean were here, they would want to get down to business. Sam could explain how he had been taken to Cold Oak and why. He’d tell us who that man in the uniform was and why he’d killed him.  _Tried to kill him_ , I corrected myself. Dad had been looking into what it might have been that Ash knew. I felt a pang of guilt. I should have been helping him, instead of locking myself in my room sobbing.

I went into the bathroom, and splashed some water on my face. It was icy cool, and hopefully brought the redness down somewhat. It was one thing to look like I’d been crying, but I didn’t want Sam and Dean to see what a total wreck I’d been. Looking at myself in the mirror, I realised I ought to brush my hair and maybe change my clothes. I wanted to look human when I got downstairs, or else the boys might mistake me for a rabid werewolf and shoot silver into me.

Finally satisfied that I would not be too horrifying to look at, I hurried down the stairs. I could hear Dean’s voice and then my Dad’s, but not clear enough to make out what they were saying. They were in the library, and as I went in, I still didn’t quite believe it. Somehow, despite what my father had said, my brain had yet to really process it properly. Sam was alive. Whether by some miracle or some reckless act on Dean’s part, he had risen from death. But the last time I had seen him, he had been a corpse, lying still and peaceful on an old torn mattress.

So, I didn’t really believe it until I saw him. My father sat at the desk, with Dean on one side and Sam on the other, leaning over the top of him to look at whatever he was showing them. As soon as I saw Sam, I let out an odd sort of squeaking sound and, forgetting my agreement to play it cool, burst into the room. Fortunately the noise I’d made got his attention, so he was turned towards me when I leapt onto him, throwing my arms around him.

“Oh my God!” I sobbed into his chest, “Oh my God!”

His arms tightened around me, and he hugged me back for what seemed like forever, but was probably only a minute or so.

“Wow, Ellie,” he said. “Are you alright?”

That was when I remembered. He didn’t know he had died and I wasn’t supposed to tell him. I let go of him, and straightened up, giving him a bright smile. “I’m just… um… I’m really glad you’re okay.”

“Me too,” he said, smiling back at me.

Realising it would look strange if I didn’t, I stepped across to hug Dean now. I didn’t leap on him, but stretched up onto my toes as I put my arms around his neck. He leant into me, his head curled so his lips were at my ear.

“Thankyou,” he whispered.

I wasn’t sure what he was thanking me for. For staying with him after Sam died? Or for trying to help the morning after, though he’d yelled at me and threatened me? Or even for not telling Sam the truth now? Whatever it was, he was welcome. When he released me, I got back onto my toes and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. This seemed to take him completely by surprise, and he responded by ruffling my hair like he would a little sister. Ten years ago, that would have mortified me, but now it was very welcome.

My father did not welcome it, however. He cleared his throat. “Dean… I got some more stuff in the truck. Help me out, will ya?”

“Sure,” said Dean.

He looked into my eyes, and I could see the fear there. He knew my father was likely to tear him a new one. I was sure he wouldn’t have an explanation for Sam’s miraculous rise that Dad would approve of. I gave him an encouraging smile as he went out. Whatever Dean had done, it had been out of love for his little brother, and it’s hard to criticise someone for that.

I was left alone with Sam, and he offered me the desk chair. I took it, sitting myself down to look at the large map Dad had been showing the boys when I came in.

“Bobby says there’s been omens everywhere, dead cattle, lightning.” He leaned over me to point and I got a faceful of plaid. He ran his hand over the area filled with Dad’s red pen markings. “All over here.”

“Except this spot,” I pointed, as Sam shifted his weight beside me. There were omens all over the Midwest, including South Dakota. But there was a sizeable gap in Southern Wyoming. “What’s special about that?”

“Bobby thinks it looks like the demons are surrounding it,” said Sam.

I looked down at the map again. There were no sizeable towns in the empty area, no obvious indication of what was significant. If only we’d known what Ash had seen…

Turning away from the map, I looked up at Sam as he stood up straight. He was tall enough when I was standing, but now his face seemed a million miles away from mine.

“So, do you feel okay?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “Yeah, I… I feel pretty good, considering. There’s some pain where he stabbed me, but I’ve been through worse.”

_No you haven’t, Sam_ , I thought.  _No you have not._

“How are you?” he asked. “Dean told me about Ellen… and Ash.”

I shrugged. If I started to think about that again, I was just going to cry some more, and this was not the time. This was a time for action, for figuring out what was going on and how we could help.

“So… what happened to you?” I asked. “Who was that guy?”

* * *

Sam had just enough time to explain everything to me before the others came back. He told me about the other psychics being brought to Cold Oak. He told me about the Yellow-Eyed-Demon wanting just one, a winner, for whatever his plans were. Sam had been the favourite, but he’d refused to fight the others. But it was down to just him and Jake, the military guy I’d tried to chase down. And Jake had betrayed him. He’d tried to kill him, and Sam had beaten him down, only to stop and realise he didn’t want to kill.

And Jake had responded by stabbing him in the back.

I was personally offended at the idea that someone could repay Sam’s inherent goodness and integrity with murder, but I didn’t know how to express that to him. I just settled for an angry grunt, which was all I had time for anyway, as the door opened and my Dad came back in with Dean… and Aunt Ellen.

“Ellen!” I yelled. “Oh my God, Ellen!”

I got up to hug her, but my Dad held a hand in front of me. “Ellie, get the Holy Water.”

It figured that I would forget about possession. The chances of Ellen surviving that fire were miniscule, but I’d taken it on faith that everything was legit, like I always did. That was the kind of stupid thinking that had gotten my arm broken and nearly ended with me dead.

It sure seemed like Ellen, though. As she sat down at the kitchen table, she gave me a little smile. I didn’t dare frown back. If this was another case of a demon possessing someone I loved, I wouldn’t give it a chance to tease me the way Meg had. I’d be wary and suspicious like my father.

I put the holy water bottle and a shot glass down on the table, as Sam and Dean walked in. Dad sat down opposite Ellen and poured a shot for her, while the boys and I stood by, waiting.

“Is this really necessary?” asked Ellen.

“Just a belt of Holy Water,” said Dad. “Shouldn’t hurt.”

Her expression totally blank, Ellen picked up the full shot, and lifted it to her mouth. She poured it straight in and swallowed, still looking my Dad dead in the eye.

“Whiskey now, if you don’t mind.”

I was so happy, I ran straight over to her. She got out of her chair and wrapped both arms around me. I felt her hand running through my hair and I thought I was about to cry again, but from happiness this time. Sam was alive, Ellen was alive… but that was where my happiness ended. Because Ash was definitely gone. There was no denying that. We’d seen his body. I could pretend he’d given someone else his watch, but that would be a stupid fantasy.

And there was no way I’d be lucky three times.

“I know, sweetheart,” Ellen said, as I choked back the tears that were about to come out for Ash.

She let me go with a kiss on my forehead, and I breathed out again. I could get through this. Ellen and Dad weren’t crying. Sam and Dean weren’t crying. I didn’t want to be the odd one out.

Dad had poured a shot of whiskey for Ellen and she belted it down.

“Ellen, what happened?” asked Dean, as I jumped up onto the kitchen bench. “How’d you get out?”

“I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “I was supposed to be in there with everyone else. But we ran out of pretzels of all things. It was just dumb luck.” She gestured to the whiskey bottle, and Dad poured her another shot. “Anyway, that’s when Ash called. Panic in his voice. He told me to look in the safe. Then the call cut out. But the time I got back, the flames were sky-high. And everybody was dead. I couldn’t have been gone more than fifteen minutes.”

Sam sighed. “Sorry, Ellen.”

Maybe I’d been wrong about being the only one about to cry. Aunt Ellen started to tear up, but she kept it together. “A lot of good people died in there. And I got to live.” She threw back another shot. “Lucky me.”

Dad, being Dad, gave her just a moment before getting straight down to business. I always wished I could compartmentalise stuff and just get on with the job like my father, but I never was able to ignore my feelings. I guess it’s something he learned to do growing up.

“What was in the safe?” he asked.

Ellen reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it and lay it out on the table in front of her. It was clearly a map. It was marked with a few big Xs and some thick black lines. Though he was looking at it upside down, Dean noticed something right away.

“Wyoming?”

* * *

Sam’s story, Ash’s map and Dad’s books put together a complete picture. Samuel Colt, the same one who had made the demon-killing gun that had disappeared when John Winchester died, had built a bunch of frontier churches in Southern Wyoming. He had then connected those churches with private railway lines. When you plotted them out on a map you could see what he had built, a giant Devil’s Trap. Now demons were massing on the outside, unable to cross the iron lines made to trap them. There was nothing in the middle but an old cemetery, but it was in the dead centre. Whatever Colt had built those lines to protect, it had to be in the cemetery.

My father figured no demon could cross the line, but Sam knew they didn’t have to. The Yellow-Eyed Demon had wanted just one psychic, one soldier to lead his army. Jake was that soldier, and so Sam figured he would be the one to cross the lines. All we could do was try to be there, to stop him from completing whatever mission he was chosen for.

We’d jumped straight to it, Dad, me and Ellen in the truck and Sam and Dean in their own car. It was a hell of a drive to Wyoming, almost twelve full hours. But between us we were able to make it, switching drivers and taking it in turns to sleep so everyone was as fresh as they could be. It was full dark by the time we got there.

It was just the sort of old cemetery you expected a horror movie to go down in. Large stone graves, beautifully decorated and with the kind of florid inscriptions people always used to write. Many of them were too weathered to read properly, but the ones you could were old school. Weeds had grown all over, encroaching on the land that living people didn’t want. There was a large and beautiful crypt in the middle.

Jake hadn’t arrived by the time we did. After hiding the cars a good distance away, we armed ourselves and took up positions around the cemetery. I was hiding behind a grave for a good fifteen minutes, an eyeline to Sam in one direction and to Ellen in the other. The gate made the same creaking sound as it had when we’d entered. Sure enough, I saw him. The same guy I had chased in Cold Oak, now dressed in jeans and a light jacket, was walking through the cemetery. I crept around the grave to stay out of sight as he approached the crypt.

Then Dean gave the signal and I stepped out of my hiding spot, gun raised and sneaking quietly towards Jake in the dark.

“Howdy Jake,” said Sam, to the man he didn’t know had murdered him.

Jake whipped around slowly, but by then the five of us had surrounded him. Behind him was the crypt, and to the front and sides were five armed and angry Hunters.

“Wait,” he said. “You were dead. I killed you.”

He said it so matter of factly, like Sam was in the wrong for being alive when he wasn’t supposed to be. Like that was rude of him.

“Yeah?” asked Sam, still totally ignorant of the truth. “Well, next time, finish the job.”

“I did!” Jake insisted. He seemed insulted. “I cut clean through your spinal cord, man. You can’t be alive. You can’t be.”

Sam was beginning to look very confused, but Dad had the wits to quickly change the subject. “Just take it real easy there, son,” he warned Jake.

“And if I don’t?” asked Jake, the aggression in his voice rising higher.

“Wait and see!” yelled Sam. His gun hand was quivering a little.

Jake could obviously see it as well as I could. “What? You a tough guy all of a sudden? What are you gonna do- kill me?”

“It’s a thought,” said Sam, but his arm still shook.

“You had your chance,” Jake reminded him. “You couldn’t.”

Sam’s face screwed up in anger. That was the thing about Sam. He was a good person, the kind of honest, decent man that wouldn’t kill you if he didn’t have to. But Jake had spit in the face of that kindness, and Sam would not forgive that.

“I won’t make that mistake twice,” said Sam.

Jake laughed, a cold, dead laughter devoid of any real emotion or amusement. It sent a shudder down my back to hear it.

It just made Dean angry. “What are you smiling at, you little bitch?”

Still smiling, Jake turned to look at me. “Hey, darling. Do something for me, will ya? Put that gun to your head.”

I felt my arm begin to move and I tried to hold it in place, pistol trained on Jake. But I couldn’t, my arm was moving and though my brain was sending signals to stop, to straighten back up, the arm was not listening. I could see my arm shaking as I fought against it, but whatever Jake was doing to me was stronger than my own mind.

Unable to stop myself, I pushed the barrel of my gun flat against my own temple.


	13. Chapter 13: Break Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and the others try to minimise the damage when a gateway to Hell is opened.
> 
> The Chapter takes place during Episode 2x22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I feel like Ellie cries too much. Then I think “No. You’re supposed to cry when people die. Let her cry. Leave her alone!!!”. So she cries.

I was ramming my gun against my head with such strength that it hurt me, digging into the bone. The harder I tried to pull my hand away, the more it resisted. Jake’s psychic power must have been strong, far stronger than Sam’s.

The others all turned to look at me, and I could see my father’s arm shaking in front of him, pistol wobbling wildly as he tried to keep it trained on Jake. He brought the other arm up to steady it.

Jake grinned broadly, as Sam looked from him to me and back again.

“See that Ava girl was right,” Jake told Sam. “Once you give in to it, there’s all sorts of new Jedi mind tricks you can learn.”

“Let her go!” Sam demanded.

But why would he? Jake had no reason to let me go. If only it had been my father, or Dean or anyone else. They wouldn’t have cared. They’d have told the others to shoot Jake, prevent him doing whatever he came to do, even at the cost of their own life.

I guess I’m not that brave. All I could think was “Oh God, oh God… Please none of you piss him off”. I didn’t know what he came to that cemetery to do, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I did not want to die. I knew it made me selfish, and I knew it made me a coward, but I couldn’t change the way I felt.

I had been in life-threatening situations before, but they were different. Running for your life or even fighting your possessed friend were active situations. You were taking action, doing what you had to do to protect yourself. But standing still, while some psycho holds the power to make you shoot yourself or not… There’s nothing you can do. My life wasn’t just dictated by how hard I fought, it was dependent on not just me, but four other people doing nothing to agitate Jake. I could rely on myself, and probably my father, but what about the others? And in any case, how would we even know for sure what he wanted us to do? We could obey him if he gave instruction, but what if someone said something he didn’t like? What if he just decided to kill me because he could?

Something brushed against my face and I realised it was tears. Oh Hell No! Crying was not an option I was willing to consider. I had to channel it into being angry.

I took my deep slow calming breaths and tried to work myself into agitation. This guy had murdered Sam, and the fact that somehow he’d come back to life was beside the point. First he had betrayed Sam, but he had been allowed to live. Sam had let his kind nature persuade him not to kill another human being. Jake had responded by literally stabbing him in the back. Thinking about that made my heartrate go up. To repay mercy with cold blooded murder was bad enough.

Now he was threatening me! He would actually make me shoot myself, in front of my father. That would destroy Dad’s life entirely. That was just unacceptable to me. Was I going to allow that? No. I was going to wait until the right moment. The others would help me, distract him, whatever it took. And then I was going to kick six kinds of shit out of this asshole.

“Everybody put your guns down,” he said. Then he smiled at me. “Except you, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart? Patronising son of a… I pictured myself punching him in the face and hoped that he was reading my mind.

My father was the first to get his gun to the floor, followed immediately by Sam. Dean and Ellen did the same, glancing over at me. I could see their anxiety. I stopped my rhythmic breathing to give Dean a weak smile. I wanted him to know that I was okay, I was coping and I was ready for anything he did.

“Okay,” said Jake, as Ellen stepped away from her gun. “Thankyou.”

Suddenly, he turned and ran up to the front of the crypt. I didn’t see what he was doing, as Dean and Ellen leapt on me at the same time. Ellen grabbed my arm, and I hit the ground as my gun fired. It was very close to my ear and the sound echoed inside my skull, but Ellen must have redirected the shot because I found myself lying in the dirt, winded, but definitely alive.

Dean had fallen directly on top of me, but he rolled off me immediately. He and Ellen knelt on either side of me, and my father soon appeared too. As Dean ran a careful hand over my forehead, I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t move. There were more gunshots, but in my winded, shocked state, I couldn’t count them.

“You’re okay, kid,” said Dean.

With one hand each behind my back, and the other pulling on my arms, Ellen and Dean were able to guide me to a sitting position. I tried to breathe properly, which was hard enough, but my Dad grabbed me and held onto me.

“I’m fine, Dad…” I managed to say.

There were more gunshots. With Dad and Ellen to pull me up to my feet, I was able to stand and it only took a few seconds to get my bearings again. When I looked around me, Jake was dead on the ground, gunshots in his chest and head. He wasn’t recognisable. Sam stood over him, still holding his gun and with some of Jake’s blood on his face. He didn’t look quite like himself. There was a rage in his face that looked strange and alien on him.

I didn’t have time to think about it. Jake had stuck a long-barrelled gun into a hole on the crypt. Some kind of mechanism was moving and we could hear the turning of tumblers and other mechanical whirrings from behind the crypt door. The doors had been locked and Jake had opened them. He was dead, but too late to stop him from carrying out whatever mission the yellow-eyed demon had sent him on.

The five of us stood looking at it, just listening for a moment. Then my father grabbed my arm.

“Oh no,” he said.

Dad was backing away from the crypt, pulling me with him.

“What is it?” asked Ellen.

“It’s Hell,” Dad said, still pulling on my arm.

Dean stepped forward and pulled the gun out of the hole, but it was too late for that to work. The mechanisms within the crypt kept moving. Dad yelled for us all to take cover and the urgency in his voice was enough. He didn’t need to pull me anymore. I ran to take cover behind a tombstone, trying to keep it between me and the crypt, while still able to peer around to look at what the crypt was doing.

Dad and Ellen were crouched behind another stone nearby, and I knew Sam and Dean were somewhere behind me. As I gripped onto the tombstone, I watched the doors of the crypt shaking, as though someone stood behind them, trying to force them open.

When they were finally pushed open, it was by a thick cloud of black smoke. Smoke was the only word I had for it, but it didn’t move like smoke. It was like something alive, the same stuff that had flown out of that girl Meg, and Sam too, when the demon in them had been exorcised. But this was thicker and darker. It wasn’t just black, but seemed to almost absorb light.

It flew out, and upwards, some parts streaking up ahead of the main cloud, and with small offshoots leaping out and over. Fortunately, it all seemed to want to move higher and as fast as possible, so it didn’t touch any of us. I imagined it would choke me if it came near my face, or perhaps it would just fly inside and possess me.

After the first main burst and the shaking earth that came with it, smaller clouds followed, flying out of the crypt one at a time. I could see now that it was not a crypt. It was designed to look like one from outside, but behind those big metal doors there was something more. From where I hid, I could make out a bright orange light, and raw earth and what looked like a long deep drop.

From behind me, I heard Dean yell out exactly what I had been thinking. “What the hell just happened?”

“It’s a Devil’s Gate,” called Ellen. “A damn door to Hell!”

I turned back to look at it again. That orange light, shining upward from an unknown depth… That was light from the fires of Hell?

“Come on! We gotta shut that gate!” called Ellen.

I was out before anyone else, propelled forward by sheer panic. That black cloud of smoke had been demons, escaping from Hell out into the world in one black mass of evil. More kept flying out, and we had to shut them in.

Sam reached the crypt at the same time as I did, and he and I took one door. It was like trying to push against a heavy wind. I was strong, and Sam was even stronger, but even with the two of us straining together, it moved only an inch at a time. I tried leaning against it and pushing with my back. As I turned, I could see Dad and Ellen weren’t having much luck with the other door either. Where Dean was, I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly, Sam called out to Dean, and as he left, I felt the full weight of the door against me. I turned quickly to get a better grip on it, and threw my full weight against it. I was able to keep it from moving back more than a few inches. Without Sam’s extra weight and strength, it was hard for me to make any progress at all. Seeing me struggle, Ellen left Dad to deal with the other door and leapt over to help me. With two, it was a little easier and we kept pushing against the resistance, slowly forcing the door back towards the gate.

With no idea what was happening to Sam and Dean behind me, I was motivated to push harder than I knew I could. Closing the doors would keep any more demons from getting out, but it would also allow us to help the Winchesters with whatever was happening. I could hear Ellen grunting with effort beside me, and I could even just make out my father’s heavy breaths over the wind whistling out between the doors.

Finally, Dad and I were standing almost side by side as our doors started to meet up. Encouraged, I gave one final push, and both doors slammed into place. The lock spun around, and a heavy clanging inside suggested that the doors were locked again.

Turning back around, I saw Dean sitting on the ground, the gun from the crypt in his hand. Nearby lay the apparently dead body of an older man. Sam was some distance away, on his feet, but obviously struggling to stay upright. And somewhere in between them stood their father. I had to blink a few times to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was. It was definitely him.

Dean managed to get to his feet, stumbling towards John. They reached out to each other, and though Sam was nearby, he just watched them. I had never seen John Winchester smile before, but he had one now, as he looked at his eldest son. Then another for Sam, before he backed away.

Standing alone, John looked back at his sons and smiled again, before a bright light burst out of him. He flickered a few times, like any spirit will do, if its connection with the world is disrupted. He was like a bad TV signal, there and gone, then back again. Finally he faded out altogether, a sprinkling of dust left behind, and quickly fading to nothingness. Whatever had happened, wherever he had come from and whatever part he had played, he was gone now.

* * *

I fell asleep on the drive home. It was daylight when we got back, but I went straight up to bed anyway. I’d already been filled in all the details: the yellow-eyed demon was dead, John Winchester had apparently climbed out of Hell itself to help Dean finish him off. There was nothing left to do but sleep for as long as possible.

When I did eventually wake up, it was nearly one in the afternoon. Creeping through the house, still in my pyjamas, I sought out company. Dad’s door was closed, and I could hear him snoring on the other side. The spare room door was shut too, and I supposed Aunt Ellen was still in there. I tiptoed down the stairs, where I found Dean passed out on the sofa.

Sam was awake, though. He was sitting at the desk, looking through one of Dad’s books. His back was to me, but in the otherwise silent house, he heard my light footsteps and turned. With a smile, he pushed the book away from him and stood up. I waited for him, peering into the study as I tried to figure what he was doing. I found out when he led me outside and onto the porch, shutting the door quietly behind him.

There was an old battered sofa on the porch, and I snuggled up into it, my legs underneath me, still a little bleary from sleep.

“Nice pyjamas,” said Sam, with a smirk.

I looked down and grimaced. I wasn’t wearing a bra, which probably wasn’t what he meant, but made me feel slightly self conscious all the same. It was much more likely he was referring to the smiling pink sheep across my chest.

“I like sheep,” I said, defensively.

He just smiled and got comfortable next to me.

“Have you slept at all?” I asked.

He nodded. “A little. I feel okay, though. Especially since I was dead.”

My mouth formed a little “O” of surprise. Dean must have told him the truth, and I hadn’t expected that. Dean would much prefer to gloss over things and pretend they hadn’t happened.

“I’m glad he told you,” I said.

Sam shook his head. “I guessed. Jake’s reaction when he saw I was alive, Dean being so worried about me taking it easy, the way you hugged me when you saw me… It added up.”

“What are you talking about, the way I hugged you?” I asked. “I was totally cool. Poker face Singer, that’s what they call me.”

I thought it was worth at least a pity chuckle, but all I got out of him was a smile, and a brief one at that.

“He did a deal,” Sam said. “One year. He got one year for my life.”

A demon deal was one of the ways I had thought about to revive someone from death. But a crossroads deal normally got a person ten years. Ten years might have been a pretty good deal for Dean, since a Hunter’s life was often fairly short anyway. Thirty seven would still have been a young death, but Dean knew how to live life to the fullest and he might have had ten good years. But just one? I stared at Sam, horrified.

“Only one year?”

Sam nodded, and I saw the pain in his eyes. Dean was everything to his brother, and I imagined Sam didn’t see much point in having a second chance if Dean wasn’t with him. It certainly wasn’t worth the suffering Dean’s soul would undergo in Hell.

“What was he thinking?” I asked, the horror and outrage evident in my voice. I regretted it immediately. “I mean… not that I want you to be dead… I just meant…”

“I know what you meant,” he said. “He says it’s his job to take care of me.”

“He does,” I said. “He did. It wasn’t his fault what happened.”

Sam nodded. “I said I’ve got to take care of him too, find a way to get him out of this.”

I nodded with enthusiasm. “Yes! There must be some loophole, some way to save him.”

“You’ll help me find it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course I will.”

Growing up, Sam and Dean had been the nearest thing I had to brothers. They still were, if you discounted the fact that I found them both incredibly attractive. Other than that, they were basically brothers, and I would do anything for them. A little bit of research was nothing to ask of me.

“So… how are you?” asked Sam.

I shrugged. There were so many conflicting and confusing emotions jumbled up in my brain that it would have been impossible to answer him with any accuracy. I felt intense relief that both he and Ellen were alive and horror at the hundreds of demons we had just seen spilling out of Hell. I was sad and afraid for Dean but that conflicted with just how happy I was to be talking to Sam and knowing he was okay. I was ashamed of my reaction when Jake had threatened my life and scared Sam would ask about it. And I was just starting to realise that I was incredibly sad about Ash.

“I’m sorry about Ash,” Sam said, as if he could read my mind. Perhaps he could, though he was probably too polite to try.

Even the sound of his name made tears start to well up. I breathed through it, trying not to cry again. I could do that later, when I was alone. But the way Sam looked at me was too much. How did he know? Was it that drunken email? Or was it just something in my face?

I started to cry and my anger and irritation with myself for breaking down just made it worse. In the end, the worst thing was how mean I was. Those last few months I’d been horrible, and rude and a good person had died thinking I hated him. Not because he’d truly done anything to deserve it, but because I was not a nice person.

“He thought I hated him,” I mumbled.

Sam shuffled down the sofa a little and put an arm around me. “No he didn’t.”

I looked up at Sam’s face, though I couldn’t see him properly through my tears. He was all blurry. “I didn’t have to be so mean,” I sobbed.

He just tightened his arm around me, and I cried into his shoulder.


	14. Chapter 14: Blow Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When another Hunter says some harsh things about her friends, Ellie loses her temper.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 3x01

You’d have thought, what with a gate straight to Hell busting open, that demons would have been everywhere. It ought to have led to absolute chaos. But even after a week, there’d been barely a peep of demonic activity. Perhaps with the death of the yellow-eyed demon and his protégé, the forces of Hell needed time to regroup.

The lack of activity was disconcerting and suspicious, so when I discovered a swarm of cicadas and failing crops in Nebraska, Dad had asked Sam and Dean to meet us so we could check it out. It had a worrying biblical quality to it, and we wanted to be certain.

It was a boiling hot May day, and we were parked outside a farmhouse in the affected area. Dad wanted to wait for Sam and Dean, so we’d been lounging outside for half an hour. No one had come to ask what we were doing there, which was a bad sign. It was far too hot to sit inside the truck, so we were outside, in the sun, listening to the loud and irritating chirp of cicadas. There must have been thousands of them, and the hot muggy air was thick with sound.

Dad had been pacing up and down as we waited, occasionally looking at his maps. I had thrown down a blanket and hauled myself up onto the bonnet of the truck, figuring I might as well try and get a tan. I was lying on my stomach, eyes closed and half asleep when I heard the unnecessary loud roar of the Impala’s engine. It suited Dean, that engine. Loud and aggressive, like it had something to prove.

I lifted my head up as they got out of the car and greeted Dad. Sam and Dad kept talking, but Dean came over to me and leant against the side of the truck. He had his good mood smirk, and was eating some kind of burger.

“You know, most girls just go to the salon,” he said.

I lifted myself to a sitting position and slid off the truck.

“I don’t have the same money to spend on my beauty regime that you do,” I teased, rolling the blanket back up. “How much does hair gel set you back each month?”

He straightened up, indignant. “I don’t use hair gel!”

I nudged him out of the way with my hip, so I could open the door and throw the blanket back in. “Oh yeah… that look is all natural.” I gave him a friendly wink as Dad beckoned to us from near the door of the farmhouse.

“I never… I… you shut up,” he hissed.

Just finishing off his burger as we got to the house, Dean took it upon himself to bang on the door. “Candygram!” he called. I doubt he expected an answer any more than I did.

I already had my lock pick out, and I gently moved Dean out of the way so I could get to the lock. It was a simple one, and it took me less than a minute to open it. I pushed open the door and was immediately assaulted with a disgusting smell.

I threw my hand over my nose and backed away from the door. I knew what a corpse smelled like, and this was definitely the smell of death. There was a body in the house.

“That’s awful,” Sam sighed, his hand over his mouth and nose.

“That so can’t be a good sign,” Dean agreed.

There were two doorways coming off the first room. Dean and Dad went one way, leaving me with Sam. He drew his gun and when he was ready, gestured for me to go through first. He followed me, ready to cover me if something was inside.

Apart from the smell, there was nothing abnormal in the entry room. We moved through slowly, listening for sounds of activity. Coming into the kitchen, we could hear screaming, fairly faint, but very panicked. It was certainly coming from inside the house, possibly the next room.

His gun at the ready, Sam kicked open the next door.

It was an ordinary living room. The screams were coming from the television, where dramatic scenes were taking place. The smell was even worse in this room, and it was obvious why. A family was seated on the couch, all of them dead. They had been dead several days at least and had sat rotting in the heat ever since.

“Oh my God,” cried Sam, recoiling back.

There was another door on the other side of the room, and Dad and Dean came through, but stopped immediately as they encountered the same horrific sight and smell.

Holding my nose, I came forward to look more closely at the dead couple and their kid. There was no obvious sign of what killed them: no bullet holes, no injuries, no knife sticking out of the bodies. There wasn’t even any blood.

“What do you think happened, Dad?” I asked, as he came up beside me.

But he shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Check for sulphur,” suggested Dean.

We all examined the room, checking windows and doors. I went as close to the bodies as I dared. I couldn’t see sulphur, and with the stench of three rotting, sun-roasted bodies, I wasn’t likely to smell it.

Dean gave a little whistle and when we looked up, he pointed towards the front of the house. I heard a car door slam, and a voice saying something, too quiet for me to hear. Sam went with Dean back the way we had come, while Dad took me with him out the back way.

When we got back to the porch, we found Sam with his hands up in surrender, and Dean on the ground, looking somewhat worse for wear. Their attackers were a familiar pair, a hunting couple we knew, Isaac and Tamara. Dad called out to them.

“Bobby!” called Tamara, in her soft English accent. She lowered her gun, and Isaac did the same. “What the hell are you doing here?” Then she squinted at me. “Is that little Ellie?”

I scowled as I knelt down to look at Dean. His nose was bleeding. “I’m not little anymore,” I reminded her. Five foot six is a perfectly respectable height.

“You know these two?” asked Sam.

Dad introduced Isaac and Tamara, while I tilted Dean’s head back, and directed him to pinch his nose. When Dad introduced him, Dean gave a less than enthusiastic wave.

Sam helped Dad to show the hunting couple the scene inside the house. I was in no hurry to go back in, and instead I ran to the car to get Dean a tissue. When I came back, he was muttering under his breath.

“I’m sure you hit first, ask questions later all the time,” I reminded him.

“Right in the face,” he moaned. “Who are these clowns?”

“Standard hunting couple,” I said. “Dad’s worked with them a few times. Haven’t seen them for years.”

Dean got to his feet, still holding the tissue to his nose. “She still remembers you as Little Ellie, huh?” I glowered at him and he took the tissue away long enough to smirk at me. “You’re still kinda little.”

* * *

Figuring three cars was rather conspicuous, the others all drove down the highway a short distance to wait. Dean volunteered me to talk to the cops, citing my “innocent little face”. Traitor. I’d been the only one who cared about the beating Isaac had given him. I had to deal with over an hour of police questioning, claiming to be an Avon lady who’d broken into the house after noticing the awful spell.

My concerned citizen routine was pretty good, though there was some surprise from the cops that I’d be an Avon lady at my age. I made up a story about selling Avon to help pay off my college, while helping Ma and Pa out on the farm. I was a Business Major. Throw in a little flirting, a few tears at the horror of it all and they were buying my story one hundred percent.

When they let me go, I drove to meet the others and Isaac and Tamara had us follow them back to their place. They lived in the area, in a cute little house overgrown with all kinds of weeds. It looked like the kind of place kids thought a witch would live in. The inside did nothing to dispel that image. It was full of bottled mixtures and strange talismans hung from the ceiling. By the time we got there, it was dark, and they preferred to light the place with candles.

While Dean rang the coroner’s office to flirt the cause of death out of an unsuspecting employee, Dad took a professional interest in the maps and books. Tamara and Isaac engaged in a little light couple bickering as they went through their supplies. Sam and I were left alone to examine the weird array of hoodoo artefacts and mucky looking potion bottles.

Afraid to touch anything, we just looked. It started with my mildly disgusted face when he pointed to a shrunken rabbit’s head, followed by his “bad smell” face when he sniffed at an open jar. We examined the rest of the room, pulling increasingly more dramatic faces until he made me omit a sudden, loud giggle. Everyone else turned to look at us, even Dean, still carrying on his phone conversation. The awkwardness just made me laugh more, but it was silent, shaking my whole body as I bit my bottom lip.

I heard a definite irritated growl from my father, but before I had time to think about it, Dean was off the phone. He went from flirty to professional in a second.

“Whole family, cause of death...” he said, pausing to keep us interested. “Dehydration and starvation. No signs of restraint, no violence, no struggle. They just sat down and never got up.”

“But, there was a fully stocked kitchen just yards away,” I said.

“Right,” Sam agreed, “What is this? A demon attack?”

“If it is, it’s not like anything I ever saw,” Dad said. “And I seen plenty.”

Dean asked the question we were all thinking. “Well, what now? What should we do?”

“Uh,  _we’re_  not gonna do anything,” Isaac said, gruffly.

I rolled my eyes, earning a stern frown from my father. But I already knew what Isaac would say. This was your classic Hunter turf war. That’s the thing about a job that attracts angry loners. They tend to hate playing with others.

“What do you mean?” asked Sam. For a kid who’d grown up in the life, he could be pretty naïve. I always got a sense from Sam that he believed other people were as good and open-hearted as he was. Sweet, really.

“You guys seem nice enough but this ain’t Scooby Doo and we don’t play well with others.”

“Well, I think we’d cover a lot more ground if we all worked together,” said Sam, still innocently missing the hostility in Isaac’s tone.

“No offense,” said Isaac. “But we’re not teaming with the damn fools who let the Devil’s Gate get opened in the first place.”

_Let?_ I thought  _Let?_  We didn’t  _let_  anything happen. Where there hell were Isaac and Tamara when it was going down? Conspicuously absent, that’s where! Sam was stabbed in the back trying to do the right thing and refusing to play the yellow-eyed demon’s game. I stepped forward, with my mouth already open, but Sam grabbed my hand.

I didn’t need to say anything anyway. Dean was already there. “No offense?” he repeated, indignant. He knew as well as I did that “no offense” is something you only say when you want to cause offense.

Tamara patiently tried to intervene before it got nasty. “Isaac, like you’ve never made a mistake.”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” he said. “Locked my keys in the car, turned my laundry pink. Never brought on the end of the world, though.”

Dean chuckled, but it was not a cheerful sound. “All right, that’s enough…”

“This isn’t helping,” said Sam, still holding onto my hand so I couldn’t leap violently at Isaac and punch him in the face. “Dean…” he went on, trying to use his voice to keep Dean as tethered as me.

“Look there are a couple hundred more demons out there now. We don’t know where they are, when they’ll strike. There ain’t enough Hunters in the world to handle something like this. You brought war down on us. On  _all_  of us.”

It was a good thing Sam still had my hand, and Tamara grabbed Isaac’s, pulling him behind her. “Okay, that’s quite enough testosterone for now.”

She pulled him away with her into another room. My memory of meeting Isaac and Tamara was pretty vague, though I’d been probably sixteen or seventeen at the time. I’d rather liked Tamara but Isaac not so much. Now I felt like that had been a correct analysis. Good job teenaged Ellie. What a fine judge of character she had been.

Now Isaac was out of the room, Sam let me tug my hand out of his.

“Bullshit,” I muttered. “Maybe nothing would have got out if we’d had some help…”

“Ellie,” warned Dad.

“After everything you went through,” I went on, looking at Sam. My muttering was getting louder. “I’ve had it up to here with Hunters and their lone wolf crap.”

“Ellie…” Sam said, grabbing at my arm again, but I wouldn’t let him. I wasn’t interested in being comforted or silenced.

“He doesn’t want to work with us?” I hissed, marching towards the door. “I don’t want to work with him!”

I had the front door open and was about to slam it behind me when I realised Dad had the keys to the truck.

“Dean!” I called. “You wanna give me a ride back to the motel.”

“Hell yeah!” he grinned, following me to the door and ushering me out.

Dean unlocked the passenger side door for me and I slid in. As he started the engine I tried to get my bearings for where the motel was. We’d arrived there the night before, but Dean hadn’t yet been. I directed him to drive into the centre of town, pretty confident I could find it again from there.

“You really don’t have time for assholes, do you?” Dean asked.

“Well, really!” I said, “Blaming it all on us. He wasn’t there! He has no idea what happened. What Sam went through!”

“Hey, I’m on your side, kid. So… Bobby and Sam gonna follow us, you think?”

I shrugged. “Dad’ll want to stick around for a while, see if he can come to peace with them. But then he’ll remember that you alone in a motel room with me is his worst nightmare.”

Dean chuckled.

“You laugh now, but he will shoot you,” I said.

“No way. Bobby loves me. I’m his dream son in law.”

I laughed so hard it made my stomach hurt.

* * *

When we got to the motel, I went into my room, while Dean got a room for himself and Sam. After he’d dropped some stuff off he knocked on my door and I let him in, a beer all ready for him.

I sat on my bed and he pulled a crappy chair out from under the table. I had my laptop out, and I began searching for more deaths or other weird goings on in the neighbourhood. At least when Dad came back and yelled at me, I could say I was working. Dean was on his phone, but we kept up a conversation, me reading out obituaries that seemed promising, while he told me every time he found a whole lot more nothing.

It was nearly an hour before Dad arrived. Sam was behind him and he pulled a face at me as he came in. This was not one of the faces from before, but I understood it. It meant “Girl, you are in so much trouble and I’m sorry.”

“What the Hell was that?” Dad asked. He didn’t shout, exactly. He rarely shouted. But he raised his voice in obvious irritation.

“I didn’t want to stand around getting insulted,” I said, putting my computer beside me on the bed. I needed to be ready so I could jump up quick if I needed to stand and yell for emphasis.

“So you threw a tantrum and left me to apologise for you?” Dad asked. “Real mature, Ellie.”

“She…” Dean began, apparently not seeing the way Sam was shaking his head at him.

Dad turned on Dean immediately. “Boy, you better be out of here in thirty seconds…”

Dean got up immediately and followed Sam outside, looking back at me with a “sorry, it’s not worth my life” face.

When the door shut behind them, Dad started back on me again. “We coulda talked them round. Instead I just spent half an hour grovelling and still came away with nothing.”

“So?” I asked, getting up off the bed. I was definitely going to need to be upright to properly power my indignation. “What do we need them for, anyway? What’s two more Hunters, especially if they’re just going to act all judgy and superior while we’re trying to get a job done?”

“Well, unless you know what’s going on here, we need all the help we can get figuring this out,” Dad said. “And I don’t know if you noticed, missy, but there’s thousands of demons just flew out of Hell. Strength in numbers.”

I shook my head, still bristling with annoyance at what Isaac had said. “We don’t need help from anyone who judges us and accuses us of things we didn’t do!”

“We did let that gate open, Ellie,” he said. “He ain’t wrong about that.”

“The gate opened!” I shouted. “And if we hadn’t been there it would never have closed again. Jake would have led the army to do whatever it was supposed to do. Where was Isaac?”

“Keep your voice down,” he reminded me. “There’s civilians everywhere.”

He was right about that. I sat back down on the bed with an angry huff. “It’s bullshit,” I said. “Every Hunter has a holier-than-thou attitude. I snapped, okay.”

“I don’t know where you get your temper,” he said, sitting down next to me. “It ain’t your mother and it ain’t me.”

Dad was a grumpy old man, but he tended to let his anger at the world out all the time, at a sort of base level of crotchety. Mom never had a bad word to say about anyone. I was a little of both, sunny and friendly like my mother, but with just as much anger inside as Dad. But, while he let it simmer away quietly by being short with everybody all the time, mine stayed hidden until it burst out in sudden explosions.

“I got your temper,” I said. “It just hides behind Mom’s cheerful nature until I let it out all at once.”

His response to this was one of his many grunts. It was the grunt of begrudging agreement and I was very familiar with it. But, God help me, I knew how to manipulate my father and I was shameless about doing so. I kissed him on the cheek and fetched him a beer.

There was no more arguing, and we made one of our silent agreements to just not talk about it.


	15. Chapter 15: Hot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Winchesters and the Singers work a weird shoe-related murder case on a hot day.

I got out of bed reasonably early the next morning, so I could have a shower before Dad got up. He was still fast asleep when I came out of the bathroom, but it was getting close to 8:30, and I figured it was best to make an early start, so I woke him and promised to bring him back coffee.

There was a coffee shop across the street from the motel. I was making my way across the carpark towards the crossing when I heard my name. I turned to see Sam, headed towards me from his own room. He caught up and we crossed the road together.

“So you survived the night, huh?” he asked.

I laughed. “Dad was mad for about five minutes, but I talked him down.”

“You’re kidding,” said Sam. “On the ride back, he was ready to kill you.”

I shrugged. “He’s all talk. He never means it.”

We ordered coffee together, bought a newspaper and walked back, each carrying two cups. He waited for me while I took one into Dad and grabbed my laptop. We might as well gather in one room to figure out our next move.

Dean was in the shower, his bed still a mess of sheets. His duffle bag was on top, clothes spilling out everywhere. By contrast, Sam’s bed was neatly made and he’d put everything back where it belonged. He sat back down at the table, where his laptop was already open. I sat opposite, opening mine to begin work.

I had time for two sips of coffee before Dean came out of the bathroom. He was wearing nothing but a towel. He seemed startled for a moment, but then he grinned.

“Morning!”

I didn’t mean to stare, but it happened. He had a lot going on, including a tight six pack. I didn’t like vanity muscles, but it was clear his body was toned from being used properly, rather than working out for its own sake. Despite the appealing shape of his abs, and somewhat adorable belly button cave, it was his pecs I couldn’t stop staring at. They were wide and smooth and I fiercely fought the urge to reach out and run my hand along them.

The blush was rising across my face and I was staring. My mouth might have been slightly open. Worse still, his grin just got wider and he stood completely still, entirely aware that I was gawping. After what felt like about an hour and a half, I finally shut my mouth and looked up at the ceiling. My face was burning. Even when I was looking away, I could still sense him standing there.

“Dude!” Sam scolded him. “Put some clothes on!”

I heard Dean chuckle and head over to look for clothes. I pressed the power button on my computer and grabbed my coffee. Sipping from it gave me something to do with my face and hands. I heard Dean head back into the bathroom to get changed and he shut the door, but I kept reading the start-up screen as the computer powered up.

Sam, bless his heart, tried to ease my embarrassment by launching straight into the subject of work. “So, since you already did the obits, I was thinking we check the rest of the newspapers for the last week. Look for anything weird.”

I took another sip of coffee to give me time to make sure my voice came out like that of a rational woman and not a babbling mess. “That’s a good idea. That family was three days dead, so we should start there, maybe.”

“Right,” he agreed.

When Dean came out of the bathroom again, he was fully clothed. Sam handed him his coffee and almost shoved the newspaper at him and he took it, still with an amused grin. Apparently, my staring at his naked torso had made his day. He spread the paper out on his bed, scanning it as he drank his coffee.

“Get this,” said Sam. “Ambulance got called to an All-You-Can-Eat restaurant, three times in one night. Two men and one woman, ate until they choked, apparently in separate incidents.”

Dean looked up from the newspaper. “That’s our kind of weird.”

“How does that relate to the farmhouse?” I ask. “It’s almost the opposite, ain’t it? That family starved to death.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “There’s nothing about this that makes sense.”

It wasn’t long before Dad knocked on the door, and Dean let him in. He had the police scanner with him and he set it up on the table, before taking half the newspaper off Dean. We all read in relative silence, occasionally reading out some story or other. The police scanner buzzed occasionally, with calls to attend a break and enter or a domestic disturbance.

After about half an hour, it finally caught our attention. There had been a murder in a shopping district. Bystanders had apprehended a woman at the scene and called police. Dad decided to change into a suit and go interview the suspect. I would normally have gone with him, but since my hair took forever to get professional, I went along with Sam and Dean to the crime scene.

* * *

We pretexted as off-duty FBI agents, just there to lend a hand. Pretty much as soon as we arrived, Dean spotted an attractive blonde he thought was worth “interviewing”. Sam and I let him go as we took in the scene. It was your standard shopping district. The shops were kind of upmarket, and looking up and down the street at the clientele I felt pretty out of place. Sam and I looked like His and Hers plaid and denim models.

The murder scene was out front of a “casual” clothes shop. Not my kind of casual. The kind that costs $100 a t-shirt. The body had been removed, but there was still blood on the sidewalk, and on the smashed windshield of a car. Horrified bystanders were clustered outside the police line, chattering to one another and watching the forensics staff go about their work.

I noticed three women talking to a uniformed cop and pointed them out to Sam. “Looks like they saw it. You should question them.”

“Why me?” he asked.

Sam could be pretty clueless sometimes. “Women, early twenties, take pride in their appearance. Can’t see the third, but two of them definitely aren’t wearing a ring. Who’s gonna get more out of them, you or me?”

He sighed. “What are you gonna do?”

I nodded my head towards a man who looked like he was in charge of the forensic team. He was wearing a suit and appeared to be texting, but the forensics team kept coming up to him and speaking. He was in his late forties and had a permanent frown and prematurely greying hair.

“I’ll see what Detective Crankypants knows,” I said.

With an amused smile, Sam turned and headed towards the three witnesses, while I strode over to the detective, fishing my fake Fed badge out of my shorts pocket.

“Pardon me, Detective.”

He looked up from his phone, staring at me for a moment, then at my boobs for a longer moment. Thanks to the heat, I was wearing a short-sleeved pink plaid button up, and the buttons were a little further apart than ideal. I realised as I looked down that my bra was clearly visible through a gap. Totally professional. Very FBI.

I handed him my badge. “Agent Jones,” I said. “My partner and I were passing and noticed the scene. What’s the story here?”

“You’re FBI?” he asked, looking me up and down. “You undercover?”

“It’s a weekend, Detective. Seems like murder doesn’t take time off though, huh?”

He actually cracked a small smile at that. “I guess not,” he said, handing me back my badge. “Detective Danson.”

“So, what have we got here, Detective?” I asked.

“Looks like straight up murder. Lady beat another to death, over a pair of shoes.”

I grimaced. Jealousy and greed have always been strong motives for murder, but shoe shopping seemed a little extreme. “Must have been some shoes.”

Detective Danson shrugged. “Women, huh?”

I resisted the urge to punch him in the face. Because clearly all women are crazy about shoes and it’s perfectly natural for one of us to kill over the issue. “Yeah. We sure aren’t rational human beings,” I said, coldly. “Looks like the victim hit the car pretty hard. She use her bare hands?”

“Yep,” Danson said. “Witnesses say she grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face into the car.”

“And no existing relationship between the women?”

“Not according to the suspect,” said Danson.

The smashed windshield suggested the victim had been thrown against it quite hard, but not necessarily with superhuman strength. A demon would probably smash the windshield in completely, as would most of the other things we usually hunted.

As I wondered to myself whether this was our kind of thing at all, I noticed Sam was looking at me. The uniform cop had gone and the three women were now focused on him, forming a small semi-circle around him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there was pleading in his eyes.

“Excuse me, Detective, my partner needs me.”

“Call me Henry,” he said.

I gave him my sweetest smile, but I’m sure my eyes were dead. Call him Henry? Sure… that’d happen. I strode over to Sam and his new friends.

“Maybe I could call you,” one of them was saying. “If I think of anything else…”

Sam’s polite, flustered smile would not help him. He was a little bit adorable, that was his problem.

“Agent!” I called out.

“Excuse me, ladies,” he said. “My partner…”

He almost ran away from them and grabbed my arm, pulling me back towards the crime scene.

“So?” I asked. “Woman beats another woman to death over shoes.”

“Yep,” said Sam. He ran a hand through his hair. “I got nothing. You?”

“No idea,” I said. “Demon possession maybe makes sense. But why?”

“Let’s find Dean,” he suggested.

We found him inside the store, talking to one of the employees. His hand was on her shoulder and he had an expression of deep concern. “…makes you realise how fragile life really is. You got to make every second count.”

Oh please! I rolled my eyes, and Sam cleared his throat.

“Excuse me a minute, would you?” Dean asked the blonde. She went away, into some kind of storeroom. Dean turned towards Sam and I, still with his fake concerned expression.

“Dean, what are you doing?” asked Sam.

“I’m comforting the bereaved. What are you guys doing?”

“Working,” Sam said. “Dead body. Possible demon attack – that kind of stuff.”

Before he’d even finished speaking, Dean was coughing into his hand. “Sam, I’m sorry. It’s just… I don’t have much time left and uh…” He coughed again, a weak, pathetic sound, as if he had tuberculosis in a Lifetime movie. “Got to make every second count.”

I rolled my eyes at his display, but Sam was affected by it. “Yeah right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Dean grinned.

I was about to remind Dean that he may have had only a year to live, but that he didn’t have to spend that year being skeezy, welching on his share of the job and guilt-tripping his brother. Before I could ask him how the hell selling his soul had resulted in lung trouble anyway, Dad came in, dressed in his suit.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Dad in his “official and important” get up, but I realised that Sam and Dean had never seen it before. Dean whistled in surprise.

“Looking spiffy, Bobby. What were you, a G-man?”

Dad explained that he had claimed to be from the District Attorney’s office. He’d spoken to the suspect, and checked for the signs she’d been possessed. But she hadn’t blacked out and she’d felt completely in control the whole incident. He’d spilled holy water on her and she hadn’t reacted.

Dean suggested that she might have been a genuine whack-job and I was inclined to agree. I’d never kill someone for a pair of shoes, but people could snap over the most random things. Perhaps she had a stressful lifestyle and the shoes had been the final straw that sent her over the edge. It could happen.

But Dad was not convinced. He didn’t believe in coincidence and the weird death of that family and now this peculiar murder, in the same area, was just too odd for him. There hadn’t been sulphur at either scene, but we knew some of the escaped demons had been in the area the night the Devil’s Gate opened.

It was Dean who smugly pointed out the store’s security camera. He’d already gotten permission from the blonde employee he’d been hitting on to go into their back room and view the tapes.

Crammed into the room together, we all looked at the monitor. Dad pointed out the suspect as she entered the shop. The footage all seemed ordinary enough. The only thing significant about it was a man speaking to the woman and then leaving the shop, some minutes before the murder.

With nothing else to go on, we printed out pictures of the man’s face. Taking a copy each, we split up to canvass the town, hoping somebody might recognise him. If he had nothing to do with the case, we were out of leads. But we had to at least try and figure out what was going on.

* * *

Hours later, my feet killing me and sweating like a spit-roasted pig, I was the first to meet Dean outside a local bar. Night had fallen, but temperatures had not. It was nearing midnight and still hot as balls. Dean was sitting in the Impala, and praise be, he had the aircon on.

“How did you not boil to death in that outfit?” I asked, sliding into the back seat. “It’s crazy hot out there!”

“I dunno, Fashion Cop. By the way, are those shorts or underwear?”

I reached over the seat and slapped him in the back of the head.

“Ow. I’m not complaining. You should definitely keep wearing them, whatever they are.”

I grunted, very deliberately. The distant memory of fifteen-year-old Ellie was excited by the prospect of Dean noticing what I was wearing. Adult Ellie hated her for it.

“Well that’s a relief. Cos your opinion is definitely the first thing I consider when I get dressed. Why are we here, anyway?”

“All anyone knew about our guy is that he might possibly drink here.”

I shrugged. “Well, it’s more than I got. Twelve hours of canvassing and I got squat. Not one person who knew him.”

“If this guy is a dead lead, I’m gonna shoot your father in the face.”

“Not if I get him first,” I said.

As if he had heard us, Dad arrived. He drove his truck up beside us, getting out and straight into the Impala’s front passenger seat. I had deliberately avoided sitting there, because I knew that was Sam’s place. Dad obviously didn’t have the same respect for the Winchester dynamic that I did. He just sat where he wanted because my father doesn’t take crap.

We waited for some time, Dad and Dean looking out at the door of the bar, and me lying on the back seat, repeatedly assuring Dean that my shoes were not dirty. It was almost ten after midnight when Sam found us. I had to sit upright again, accidentally sighing loudly, as he climbed in next to me.

“Dude, not cool,” Dean told him. “You’re cramping Ellie’s style.”

“She’ll live,” he said. “So… John Doe’s name is Walter Rosen. He’s from Oak Park, just west of Chicago. Went missing about a week ago.”

We were all thinking it, but Dean was the first to say it. “The night the Devil’s Gate opened?”

“Yeah,” said Sam.

“He’s gotta be possessed, right?” I asked. I may be a little more willing to believe in coincidence than my father, but I got a limit.

“It’s a good bet,” Sam said. “So, what? He just walks up to someone, touches them and they go stark raving psycho?”

“Those demons that got out at the gate,” said Dad. “They’re gonna do all kinds of things we haven’t seen.”

“You mean the demons we  _let_ out,” said Sam.

That right there was why I had been so angry with Isaac. He had Sam believing that what happened at the Devil’s Gate was our fault. If it was possible to blame himself for something, Sam Winchester would do it. He didn’t need it coming at him from other people.

“Hey, we didn’t…” I began.

But Dean cut me off. “Shh! Look…”

The man from the security footage, Walter Rosen, or whoever had taken his body, was walking across the carpark towards the bar.

“All right. Showtime,” said Dean.

I could hear the same edginess in his tone that I felt. We’d spent all day showing a guy’s picture around town and it was time for some action. I just wanted a straight up fight, something simple and easy. They try and kill us we try and kill them.

“Wait a minute,” Dad said.

I rolled my eyes. “Why?”

“What did I just say? We don’t know what to expect out of this guy. We should tail him til we know for sure.”

I did not want to spend hours on end waiting outside a bar and then tailing the dude only to end up just getting into a fight anyway. We might as well take him then, while we had energy.

“How long we gonna hang around?” I asked. “A day? A week?”

“We’re no good dead, missy! And we’re not making a move until we know what the score is.”

“That’s…”

“Hey, Bobby? I don’t think that’s an option.”

I was surprised Sam was agreeing with me until I realised why. Another car had come into the parking lot and its occupants had got out. Isaac and Tamara were following our target into the bar.

“Oh, come on!” I moaned.

“You were itching to move, a second ago,” said Dad.

We all tumbled out of the car, going to our trunks to fetch weapons. I grabbed a holy water flask and a pistol, preloaded with salt rounds. I didn’t want to walk into the bar with a weapon drawn, but I was able to tuck it into my waistband and hide it under my shirt.

When we got to the door of the bar, it wouldn’t open. We had seen Isaac and Tamara walk right in just a minute before and now the door was locked. We were not dealing with a single demon anymore. They were in control of that bar and our fellow Hunters were in serious trouble.


	16. Chapter 16: Sinful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team face the actual incarnation of the seven deadly sins. And one of them tells everyone the uncomfortable truth about Ellie.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 3x01

Sam was pushing at the door and it clearly wouldn’t open. All the same, Dean had to try it for himself. Shockingly, it didn’t open for him either. The lock wasn’t visible from the outside, so we couldn’t just shoot it off. Dean took a step back, sizing the door up as the rest of us pulled out our guns. He shoulder charged it, hitting with a thud that made me wince. Before he could make another run at it, Dad held a hand up to stop him. They took a run together, both of them colliding with the solid door. It barely moved.

“Back door?” I asked.

“If they’ve barred this door, they won’t leave another one open,” Sam said.

Dad and Dean ran at the door again, but they may as well have been running at solid brick. Surely, the demons on the other side knew by now that someone was trying to bust in. Even if we could break it down, they’d be ready for us.

“Stop,” I said, grabbing Dean and my father before they could run again.

“Ellie, we gotta…” Dean started, but I stopped him before he could state the obvious.

“You’ll never get it down that way. Stop.”

“Well, how else are we gonna get in? Fly?” Dad asked.

I pointed to his truck. Sam understood me right away, but it took the others a second longer.

“No,” said Dad.

“Yes,” said Dean. “That’ll work.”

“Fine,” Dad said. “But we need to move quick. We go in, get Isaac and Tamara in the truck and we drive straight out.”

“What about the Impala?” asked Sam.

“Dean, give your keys to Ellie. She’ll stay in your car as backup and then follow us out.”

“Back up?” I protested. “More like lame excuses to keep Ellie out of the action.”

Dad grunted with irritation and I knew I was wrong. Not about him trying to keep me out of the action. That was definitely what he was doing. But now wasn’t the time to get into a fight with my father. Isaac and Tamara were in danger every second I argued.

“Just stay in the car and be ready. Dean, give her your keys.”

Dean took his keys out of his pocket, frowning at me. With a sigh, he threw them at me, and I caught them with one hand. I reholstered my pistol and went to unlock the Impala. The others got into the truck and Dad had the engine started before I even had time to get properly behind the wheel. I had to adjust Dean’s seat a lot, and he was sure to be irritated about it later.

I wound down the window, and hoped they would hear me yelling. “Don’t forget there’s a Devil’s Trap in the trunk! Grab one if you can!”

As they drove forward, I started the Impala’s engine and took off the handbrake. Usually, when I got hold of a car, it was to strip it. Driving a classic like the Impala was a pretty rare event. It was nice riding in the car, but the feel of the engine was even sweeter while in the driver’s seat. What was an aggressive roar from outside was a smooth purr on the inside.

It wasn’t the right time to enjoy the privilege of driving Dean’s baby. I was worried about Tamara, and Isaac too, however much I disliked him. I was nervous about Dad and the boys busting into the bar in the truck, too. We didn’t know how many demons were in there. Or if there were other human hostages.

My foot on the brake, I kept the engine ready. I may have kept my mouth shut, but it was irritating that my father had found a way to keep me from going inside. I was just as capable of fighting a demon as Sam or Dean. I’d knocked out a demon while it was in Sam’s body, after all. I’d kept hold of a poltergeist while it was manifest and those things are strong. I knew what I was doing. As soon as it had dawned on him what was really out there, Dad had bundled me off to karate lessons, once a week. Just three years old in a gi that barely fit, imagine it! (I’ve seen the photos and I was super adorable, trust me.) And anyway, I could handle a pistol before I could spell it properly. Keeping me out of a fight was totally illogical of him.

Reflecting on this with annoyance, I watched the truck go crashing through the door of the bar. It went through clean, and that at least was good news. I couldn’t see what was going on inside and I contemplated moving the car around so I could see better if they really did need my back-up. But I only had a minute to consider it before the truck came back out again, wheels spinning up dust as it screeched out in reverse.

I took my foot off the brake as the truck swung around and headed back towards the road. It was a chance to test the Impala out and see how it accelerated. Very well, in the end. It handled well too, though it took a bit of strength to steer effectively. The car really was Dean, loud and aggressive, kind of old fashioned and requiring a firm hand to control. But smooth, strong and super nice to look at.

Speeding out of the lot after Dad, I saw the busted in door in the rear vision mirror. Agitated figures were chasing towards us, but by the time they got to a vehicle, we would be long gone.

* * *

Back at Isaac and Tamara’s house, I parked the Impala behind the truck. Dean was already out of the car and Dad was just getting out. Sam was helping Tamara out of the backseat, and Isaac was not with them. I hurried over, as Dean prepared to open the trunk.

They had caught one, the man from the video of the shoe murder. As Sam led Tamara into the house and Dad locked up the truck, I grabbed the demon’s feet and helped Dean haul him out of the trunk.

“Isaac?” I asked.

“Dead,” was all Dean said, and I sighed.

I had not liked Isaac at all, but that did not mean I wanted him to die. He was a good hunter and he seemed like a good husband. I wondered if his death had protected Tamara in some way. It seemed like the way he would want to die, saving his wife.

The demon was still conscious and he cursed at us as we carried him through the front door. His head bumped, but Dean wasn’t bothered by that. A few steps ahead of us, Dad fetched a chair before we got there. Sam had found some rope before taking Tamara into another room, and there was already a Devil’s Trap on the ceiling. Every good Hunter has a Devil’s Trap handy.

When we were sure he was secure, Dad ran to the truck to grab a book while Dean and I headed into the other room, where Sam and Tamara were arguing.

“It’s suicide, and it’s pointless,” Sam was saying, running his hand through his hair.

“I don’t care!” Tamara said.

It was obvious what they were arguing about. Tamara wanted to go back there and take revenge for her husband’s death. I didn’t blame her. Her face was streaked with tears and she could not stand still. She was filled with adrenaline and brand new grief. I sympathised completely, but Sam was right. Revenge wouldn’t solve anything, and Tamara was not in the right frame of mind to be making decisions. Not that it was her fault, of course. But since we still had our rational minds, it was our responsibility to keep her from acting impulsively.

“Alright, I say we stop and figure out…” I started.

“And I say we’re going back!” Tamara shouted. “Now!”

“Just hold on a second,” Sam said, his voice stern but not aggressive. He was trying to remain calm and sensitive to Tamara’s situation.

“I left my husband bloody on the floor!” Tamara reminded him. Poor woman.

I came in between her and Sam, reaching out to her. One hand on each shoulder, I held her still and looked into her face.

“We understand that,” I said. “But if you go back there now, you’ll be killed. I don’t think Isaac would want that.”

“I’m going back!” she said, tearing out of my grip.

“I’ll go with her,” Dean offered.

Sam whipped around immediately, his eyes wide as he stared at his brother. “It’s suicide, Dean!”

“So what? I’m dead already!”

Now I was staring at him too. Dean may have traded his soul, but he still had a year left. That was a long time. Time to find a way out. Time to help us deal with whatever had come out of Hell. Had he already given up? Or was he determined to go out in a blaze of pointless violence?

“How you gonna kill ‘em?” asked Sam. “Can’t shoot ‘em! You can’t stab ‘em. They’re not just gonna wait in line to get exorcised.”

He was absolutely right. The only demon I’d ever seen was Meg, once in that original body and once in Sam. Dad and the boys had all dealt with other demons before, but one demon was all very well. A whole group, all at the same time? They were stronger than humans and they didn’t even have to touch you to hurt you. Who knew what damage they could do in a gang!

“I don’t care!” Tamara yelled.

Sam and I looked at each other. If Tamara was determined to go back, and Dean was buying into her grief-mad revenge mission, we would have a hard time restraining both of them, even with Dad’s help. I wondered whether it would be wrong to let Tamara loose on our prisoner. Maybe smacking him around some would give her an outlet for her rage. What about the poor man the body belonged to, though?

I held my hands up, trying to communicate my exasperation to Sam.

“We don’t even know how many of them there are,” he reminded Tamara.

“Yeah we do.” Dad had come into the room. He had  _Binsfeld’s Classification of Demons_  in his hands. We had packed it into the truck, knowing that open gate must have spewed out demons of all kinds.

Dad explained the situation. He was confident that we were dealing with seven demons. Specifically, the Seven Deadly Sins. I had read about them before, some years ago. It was a curiosity at the time, the idea that the cardinal sins were actually personified as demons.

What Dad said made sense though, and Sam arrived there at the same moment as I did.

“The family. They were touched by Sloth. And the shopper…”

“Envy,” I said. “That’s Envy we got tied up in there?”

“Right,” said Dad. “I couldn’t suss it out until Isaac. He was touched with an awful Gluttony.”

God! How had Isaac died?

Tamara had barely been listening. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if they’re the Three Stooges or the Four Tops! I’m gonna slaughter every last one of them!”

This was more than Dad was able to take. Always somewhat crotchety, nothing made him angrier than stupidity. “We already did it your way,” he said, harshly. “You burst in there half-cocked and look what happened. These demons haven’t been topside in half a millennium! We’re talking medieval! Dark Ages! We’ve never faced anything close to this!” His voice had raised to a shout now. “So we are gonna take a breath and figure out what our next move is!”

There was a moment of tense silence. I didn’t disagree with anything Dad was saying. He was completely right, but his manner of delivery could have been better. Everyone does silly things when they’re grieving.

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said, now calm and quiet.

But it was all too much for Tamara. She left the room, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Dad!” I hissed. “That was…”

“I don’t need a lecture from my own daughter,” he snapped. “Dean, get the Holy Water. We’ve gotta question our new friend.”

Dean rushed to do as he was told, while Dad left right away, slamming his book shut and heading back to where we had left Envy tied up. Left alone, Sam and I looked at one another. I could see the sadness in his eyes, verging very close to that puppy look he got. I knew how he felt, but I tried to give him a little smile. Not because there was anything to smile about in our situation, but because sometimes it can be reassuring, and I just didn’t know what other use I could be.

“Come on,” I said, and he followed me into the next room.

Tamara had taken her moment and now came back, joining Sam and I as we entered the room. Envy had obviously heard much of our conversation. We hadn’t exactly been quiet. As we came in, he was chuckling, not bothered by the intense glares of Dean and my father.

“So you know who I am, huh?”

“We do. We’re not impressed,” said Dad.

Envy just smiled smugly, like he didn’t care what we thought of him. That’s a personality trait demons seem to have in common: self confidence. They don’t care what anyone thinks. They’re always very happy with who they are.

“Why are you here?” Sam asked. “What are you after?”

Envy just laughed at him, and Dean took offence. He opened his flask, splashing holy water on our prisoner. It sizzled, and Envy writhed from the pain. When he spoke, he was panting, less smug. “We already have… what we want…”

“What’s that?” I asked.

The pain of the holy water had begun to subside, and he answered again with that same irritating pride. “We’re out. We’re free. Thanks to you, my kind are everywhere. I am legion, for we are many.” He laughed and I fought the urge to backhand him across the face. We had not opened that Devil’s Gate and I was tired of everyone saying we had. “So me, I’m just celebrating,” he went on. “Having a little fun.”

“Fun?” asked Sam.

“Yeah.” Envy smiled, still smug. “Fun. See, some people crochet. Others golf. Me? I like to see people’s insides… on their outside.”

“I’m gonna put you down like a dog,” snarled Tamara.

“Please,” Envy said, laughing at her. “You really think you’re better than me? Which one of you can cast the first stone, huh? What about you, Dean? You’re practically a walking billboard of gluttony and lust.”

Dean made no attempt to deny this. He knew what he was and felt little shame about it. He didn’t believe in God, so what did he care about his sins?

“As for you,” said Envy, nodding at me. “Oh, you’re my kind of girl. Always comparing yourself to someone. He’s stronger, he’s smarter, she’s prettier. You got a deep pool of envy inside you.”

I tried to keep my face calm and straight. His words made me uncomfortable. My sin wasn’t on the surface like Dean’s. What I thought about myself and other people was private. The way Sam and my father turned to look at me raised a feeling of bile in my stomach. It was bad enough for my father to look at me the way he was, with concern and confusion. But Sam… I didn’t need Sam’s questioning glance.

Fortunately for me, the taunting quickly moved on Tamara, as Envy guessed correctly that she was the weakest link.

“And Tamara. All that wrath. Oooh. It’s the reason you and Isaac became hunters in the first place, isn’t it? It’s so much easier to… drink in the rage than to face what really happened all those years ago.”

Whatever it was he referred to, it did as it was designed to and enraged Tamara. In a perfect illustration of his point, she lunged forward and gave Envy a violent double smack across the face. Dean and I both rushed to grab her, pulling her back. Fuelled by pure rage, she was strong and we only just managed between us.

Envy laughed, and I thought to myself that if he had his own sin, it was definitely pride. “My point exactly. And you call us sins. We’re not sins, man. We are natural human instinct. And you can repress and deny us all you want, but the truth is you are just animals. Horny, hungry, greedy, violent animals. And you know what? You’ll be slaughtered like animals too.”

He paused, clearly a demon familiar with the concept of dramatic effect. He left just a moment for that idea to sink in.

“The others. They’re coming for me.”

“Maybe,” Dean said. “But they’re not gonna find you. Cos you’ll be in Hell. Someone send this clown packing.”

“My pleasure,” Tamara said.

The sounds of Envy’s screams followed the rest of us out of the room, as Tamara read the exorcism rite.

* * *

It was about an hour before they found us. We considered running. Dean offered himself as a decoy so the rest of us could get away. Envy was successfully exorcised, killing Walter Rosen in the process. Whatever Envy had done with the body over the previous week had obviously been too much.

We had grabbed every weapon we could, preparing for a siege. Shotguns preloaded, holy water bottled, we finally heard them, announcing their presence in the sickest way possible: with Isaac’s voice.

He called for Tamara, and she ran to the window. I followed her, horrified at the sight outside. Isaac’s body was on the porch, battered and bloody, but eyes open and standing upright. They had possessed his corpse.

I pulled Tamara away from the window, but she could still hear her husband’s voice, crying out for help.

“Tamara! I got away, but I’m hurt bad! I need help!”

“It’s not him,” I reminded her. “They’re vicious, doing this to you.”

I jumped back a little as the demon banged on the door. “Baby, why won’t you let me in? You left me behind back there. How could you do that? We swore… at that lake in Michigan. Remember? We swore we would never leave each other!”

“How did he know that?” she asked, through her tears.

I didn’t know. The same way Envy had known about the shameful pool of jealousy I was harbouring. It didn’t matter. I tried to pull Tamara away from the door, to hold her, help her through the pain, but the demon outside was pushing all her buttons.

“You just gonna leave me out here? You just gonna let me die?! I guess that’s what you do, dear! Like that night those things came to our house… came for our daughter! You just let her die too!”

“You son of a bitch!” she screamed, pulling herself out of my grip so hard I nearly fell. I called after her, and so did my father, but it was no use.

She pushed open the front door, and that would surely have formed a break in the salt line I had carefully laid down. Like an animal, she crash tackled the demon possessing her husband’s corpse, screaming at him in barely articulate words.

But he had not been alone. The other five sins now stood before a wide open door and a broken line of salt. To enter the house, they only had to move through the door… and directly into me.

I’d been trying to pull Tamara away from the door, and so I was directly in the path of all five demons. I tried to turn and run back to the safety of the next room, where more salt lines and a Devil’s Trap would keep them from getting too close and give me a chance to pick up a weapon.

I didn’t make it. Before I could make any move, a strong hand grabbed me by the throat. I was lifted from the ground, the hand around my neck like a clamp, crushing my windpipe and blocking my breath.

The only thing I registered was the gasp of air as they let go, and that I was flying across the room. After that, there was nothing at all.


	17. Chapter 17: Rising Tension

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is required to take it easy again, and she doesn’t care for it.
> 
> This Chapter starts after 3x01 and covers events of 3x02 and 3x03

At first I thought it was an alarm clock waking me, with a steady rhythm of monotonous beeping. My whole head and face ached, like someone was putting pressure everywhere and squeezing and squeezing me. It was worse than any hangover I’d had before.

Trying hard to remember through the pain, I forced my heavy eyelids open. As the beeping continued, I managed to bring my eyes into focus, but there wasn’t much to see. I was lying on my back, and all there was above me was white ceiling. No postcards. I didn’t generally sleep on my back. I always went out that way, but I ended up rolling onto my stomach, kicking off half the covers in the process.

When I tried to turn my head, I realised my neck was sore too. This wasn’t nearly as alarming as what I saw. Ignoring the pain, I forced myself to turn to get a better look. The beeping wasn’t coming from an alarm clock at all. There was a heart monitor beside the bed. I flexed my fingers, noticing now the censor thing clipped onto my finger. There was the tightness on my wrist too, from an IV drip. I could see the bag hooked above the monitor, half empty.

I was looking towards a window, and two chairs were pushed against the wall. One was empty, but a familiar figure was sitting in the other, looking at his cellphone. It wasn’t the first person I would expect to see next to my hospital bed, but I guess it wasn’t the last.

“Sam?”

My voice came out weak and raspy. My throat was dry and my lips felt all cracked. How long had I been out? I tried to remember what had happened in the first place. Something about jealousy and a bar.

Sam looked up, and I recognised his smile as one of relief. He must have been waiting for me to wake up. But why? Why wasn’t my father there?

He put his phone back in his pocket and leant forward. “Hey. It’s okay. You just hit your head.”

“Dad…” I muttered.

Sam reached down to a bag at his feet, pulling out a bottle of water. “Dean took Bobby out for some air,” he said, taking the lid off the water. “Here.”

He stood up and with one hand on my back, held me upright. I was able to take the water and pour a little down my throat. It soothed the dry, rusty feeling, but just sitting up was exhausting, even with Sam’s help. I gave him back the bottle and he lowered me back to the pillow gently.

It was starting to come back to me. The Seven Deadly Sins had come for us, and Tamara opened the door. One of them had grabbed me and I’d gone flying. If I was safe in hospital, the battle must have been over and presumably, my side had won. Sam had mentioned my father and Dean, but what about Tamara?

“Is Tamara okay?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “Yeah. Well, as much as she can be. She headed off for a while. Needs to figure out who she is without Isaac.”

I nodded and the action caused the pain in my head to sharpen again. It was worst at the back just left of centre. Maybe that was where I’d been hurt when I landed.

“The Sins?”

“All gone,” he said. “Two of the possessed victims lived. I guess that’s something.”

I laid back, head turned as much as I could, looking at him while I processed this. Two out of seven wasn’t very good, in terms of saving the victims. It reminded me of Meg. Not the demon, but the girl she’d possessed. I still remembered her face when she was dying, after months of suffering all the pain the demon didn’t feel. The Sins had only been in those bodies a week, but it was enough to kill them. What had they put them through?

“I should get the nurse,” Sam said.

He came back with the nurse just at the same time my Dad and Dean arrived. It was a tiny room, and after letting Dad see I was okay, the nurse kicked all three of them out so she had room to move. She checked the heart monitor thing, and the needle in my arm. Then she asked me questions. Just easy stuff like my name and my father’s name and what year it was. I answered them all and she seemed pretty satisfied. She raised the back of the bed for me, so I could see better without having to hold myself up. She said the doctor would come by when he could, and went out again, letting my father and the boys back in.

Dad came in first, leaning over the bed to hug me. I could feel how careful he was being, trying not to squeeze too tight. He wanted to squeeze and he held on so long, I began to feel awkward. Sam and Dean were standing in the doorway, watching us.

“Dad… Um…”

He let go, sitting down by the bed, and pulling the chair so close, you could barely fit a playing card between us. Dean took this as a cue to come in, grinning at me.

“What did I tell ya, Bobby? Kid’s fine.”

He stayed standing at the end of the bed, while Sam took the other chair next to Dad. All of them were still looking at me, and though Dean seemed to feel optimistic, Dad and Sam were competing for saddest eyes. Lying down, with my head back on the pillow, I could see Dean best though, so I didn’t have to look at their disconcerting worried faces.

“Why’d you bring me to hospital, anyway?” I asked. “If it’s just a bump on the head?”

There was a long moment as they all exchanged looks with one another. It was Sam who answered. “There was a lot of blood, Ellie. You wouldn’t wake up.”

“But… but I’m okay now, right?”

There was a lot of pain. My whole head felt heavy and ached constantly, but that was all. Sure I was tired and a little confused, but that was probably drugs. I had to be on painkillers, surely.

“You busted your skull open,” Dad said.

I stared at him. No wonder it hurt so much. A broken skull… Didn’t that mean surgery and blood pooling in the brain and all kinds of scary stuff like that?

“It’s a thin fracture,” Sam said, calmly. “Really minor.”

“She could have been killed, Sam!” Dad snapped at him.

“But she wasn’t,” Dean reminded him. “The doctor said she’ll be fine.”

“Right,” Sam agreed. “There’ll be some painkillers and you go can home and take it easy.”

I rolled my eyes. Again! I had been taking it easy, thanks to that damn broken arm. Now a fractured skull. It wasn’t fair. In twenty years of hunting, Dad had broken a finger twice and needed stitches three times. Dean had been electrocuted that time and then there was the car accident. But both his near death experiences had resulted in pretty much instant healing. Sam had kept hunting with a broken wrist, like it was nothing.

“Just a few weeks,” Dean said. “Then we’ll have you back out there.”

I smiled back at him, though I didn’t feel at all happy. I knew he was trying to make me feel better, and that deserved a smile. Dad was grim faced, however. He stood up and pushed his chair back.

“Dean, Sam… Step outside with me, will ya?”

Something told me it wasn’t going to be as simple as Dean suggested.

* * *

 

After two days in hospital, the doctors let me leave, with a big box of painkillers and instructions to rest at home. Sam and Dean went their way, with a hug each and a promise from Sam to email. They were headed to a possible case in Maryland, and we were going home. I slept almost the whole way from Lincoln to Sioux Falls. The pain killers made me pretty drowsy and the exertion of getting out of my hospital bed and into a wheelchair, then from the chair to the car was enough to knock me out.

The instructions were for a week’s bed rest and then to take it easy for two months, and to follow up with my doctor in Sioux Falls. They said I was lucky and that the break was just a thin crack in my skull. Nothing had moved out of place and so it would all heal up naturally over time.

At first, resting in bed wasn’t a problem. I was tired anyway, and the pain killers knocked me out most of the time. I got up to use the bathroom, and I stopped needing to lean on Dad after the first day. But a week in bed became two, as Dad insisted I take it easy. He didn’t like the look of my bruising and wanted to be absolutely sure I was healing properly.

When I started to go crazy, he relented and let me go downstairs. I had to camp there for the day, all but shackled to the couch and permitted to walk only for bathroom breaks or to stretch when my back got sore. Every meal was made for me, and he wouldn’t even let me into the kitchen to get a glass of water. In the third week, he caught me trying to go outside for some fresh air and hit the roof. If I wanted to go outside, he had to go with me, to keep an eye on me and make sure I was okay.

I emailed Sam, threatening to actually strangle my father if he didn’t give me space to breathe. That night the boys called from New Mexico. They talked to me for half an hour each, telling me about their recent cases. There’d been a wendigo and a couple of vengeful spirits. There was a witch in Idaho and a cursed necklace in Ohio. Dean told me he was living life to the fullest and had plans to head to Indiana. There might have been a case there, and even if there wasn’t, he knew a girl. He was apparently trying to relive his greatest hits before his contract came due.

Even though Dean was the one with eleven months left to live, Sam was far more down about it. He now knew that Dean’s crossroads deal had included a clause that any attempt to trick or bargain his way out of the contract would result in Sam’s instant death. Consequently, he had forbidden Sam from even looking into it. He’d said nothing about me, of course. I’d been looking through all Dad’s books (easily located by a totally boss database system!) for any possible solution but I’d had no luck. There were possibilities, but nothing that wouldn’t lead to Sam dropping dead. The worst case scenario was that we attempted to get Dean out of the deal on some technicality, and the demon took Sam, only for the Hell Hounds to come for Dean anyway. With such an unthinkable consequence, it wasn’t worth considering.

I tried to cheer Sam up, on the phone and in emails, but with little success. He was grateful for it, however, and returned the favour. Whatever he said to my father, the rules were loosened and I was finally given some freedom. I couldn’t use the stove, but I could fix myself a sandwich! I was allowed free reign of the house and the yard. He even took me shopping, driving me into town and waiting on benches while I happily zipped through the mall. I wasn’t a big mall kind of girl, for the most part, but the chance to get out of the house was thrilling and there was a lot of stuff I needed. He drew the line at giving an opinion about jeans, though.

We bought a scanner, so I could spend my days productively. I was scanning the library. Even Dad could see that being able to send Sam and Dean, or any other Hunter, a book electronically would be incredibly useful. Plus, there’d be a permanent copy of them, safe in the realm of cyberspace.

Sam and Dean called regularly. Dean’s lady friend had changelings in her neighbourhood and he called to tell me how they stole human children and put their own in the house. The changeling kids would kill the father and feed off the mother in the night. He described it as “some freaky shit”.

Just a few days later, I was upstairs when Dad called up to me. I went down to find him in the study, on the phone. “I wrote it all down. Here, talk to Ellie a minute.”

He mouthed “Sam” at me, and handed me the phone, before heading to the shelf where he kept his journals.

“Hey Sam,” I said. “You clueless kids calling for help again?”

“Any excuse to hear Bobby’s cheerful voice,” he said. “How are you?”

“One hundred percent fine,” I said, nice and clearly so that Dad would hear me from where he was standing. “Scanning most of the day. It’s a wild ride”

“I bet,” he said. I could hear that he was smiling.

“So, what have you got?” I asked. I loved hearing what Sam and Dean were up to. It was the next best thing to being out there myself. Generally, I liked to get an account from each of them: the facts from Sam and colourful descriptions from Dean, peppered with his opinions.

“Turns out Dad had a storage locker,” said Sam. “Something got stolen from it.”

“What?” I asked.

“A rabbit’s foot. We got it back, and I’ve had a run of good luck ever since. Like, crazy good luck.”

A lucky rabbit’s foot! That was old school magic. It sounded like a good thing. Sam could do with some good luck for a change. Perhaps it could even help him get Dean out of his contract.

“Cool. Do you think it…”

“Balls!”

Dad had been flicking through an old journal. He cut off my sentence all together and motioned for me to give him the phone. I said a quick goodbye to Sam and gave it to him. I leant against the desk to listen as Dad explained the situation to Sam. The rabbit’s foot was lucky, but it was also cursed. As soon as Sam lost it, his luck would turn and he would be plagued by misfortune until it killed him.

He assured Dad he would not lose it. All he had to do was make sure he held onto it until we figured out how to break the curse. Dad remained sceptical that he could do this. It was part of the thing’s cursed nature that everyone would lose it eventually. With a frustrated mumble, he handed the phone back to me.

“Don’t worry, Sam. Enjoy your good luck until we figure out how to break the curse.”

He sighed. “Your Dad doesn’t think we can.”

“Course we can!” I said. We’d dealt with worse situations than one cursed rabbit’s foot. Sam had come back from actual death. Besides, I’d never seen a curse couldn’t be broken somehow. “And if you’ve got good luck for now, that means we’ll get lucky and find the answer.”

I could hear a smile in his voice, but it was masking his concern. “Thanks, Ellie.”

“Just chill and we’ll hit the books. Say hi to Dean!”

After I hung up on him, I went straight to the computer, where my database program was already open.

Four hours of intense research later, I had found the answer. It was a heavy duty ritual, calling for some fairly tricky ingredients and a hell of an incantation, but it was supposed to break any curse. They just had to burn the rabbit’s foot in the cleansing fire and Sam would be fine.

As Dad went to grab the phone and call Dean, I looked at the books carefully. If Sam was having good luck, then it was the perfect time for me to look again for a way out of Dean’s contract. Sam would have to be lucky for me to find something!

I was looking at the spines of the books, thinking I could try pulling one out at random. Then I heard Dad from the kitchen.

“He what!?”

I ran in, to find Dad shaking his head at me. “He lost it,” he said, before giving his attention back to Dean again.

I sighed. So much for my plan to use the opportunity to save Dean. With his death a whole ten months away, Dean might has well have forever. Those cursed with the rabbit’s foot always died within the week. Looking at my blanket nest on the couch, I sighed. Sam and Dean’s lives were in danger on a daily basis, but one visit to the hospital and I was under virtual house arrest. Envy had been right about me. I was jealous. I wanted to do what Sam and Dean did, road trip across the country, visiting all the places in my postcards, going where my help was needed. I was lucky to have a father that cared about me, but I was also frustrated. Maybe at fifteen his concern would have been fair, but I was twenty five years old. He was my age when I was born.

Going back to the database, I decided I’d better start searching for a way to break Sam’s curse without having the object. I had just started when Dad came back, announcing he knew who had stolen the rabbit’s foot from Sam and that the name of the game was now to figure out where she was.


	18. Chapter 18: Explosion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and Bobby have a difference of opinion. Loudly. And Sam and Dean are caught in the middle.
> 
> This Chapter takes place between Episodes 3x03 and 3x04

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to write this while thinking about what would actually happen on Supernatural. I love the idea of the opening teaser, followed by Sam and Dean arriving at Bobby’s house to hear an ear-splitting argument. I can just picture their awkward faces.

Bela Talbot was a dealer in supernatural artefacts. Dad had met her before and he knew she was trouble. She had the cursed rabbit’s foot and she wasn’t going to give it back easily. Obviously she was planning to sell it which, even apart from the fact it would kill Sam, was hugely irresponsible. Fortunately, if you deal in the supernatural, you have to be known to Hunters. After ringing around, Dad was able to track her down and give Dean her address.

It all worked out, with Dean able to steal the thing back and ultimately the boys performed the cleansing ritual. Bela tried to stop them, shooting Sam in the shoulder in the process, a move that outraged me so much I couldn’t stop ranting for five minutes. Dean found my anger amusing, but I knew he was pissed about it too.

Another month passed. I no longer needed the painkillers. Dad even gave me back my car keys so I could drive myself into town. I started working again, stripping the cars that came in. Everything was apparently back to normal. My skull healed up, the Doctor was satisfied. I went running to regain some of the fitness I’d lost. I worked out, I got out the punching bag. I was healthier than before my skull cracked and I was ready to get back out there, just like Dean had said.

That’s where the trouble started.

I caught wind of a case in Fargo. When I told Dad about it, he suggested he go check it out while I stay home. Three new cars had come in and someone had to take them apart. The case turned out to be a simple salt and burn and he was back in just over twenty four hours. When I saw evidence of a vampire nest in Minnesota, Dad called a local guy he knew. He said it wasn’t worth our going when there was someone else nearby. I was suspicious at that point.

The shit hit the fan when it happened in Sioux Falls. Three local kids were found dead, torn up and with their hearts missing. There was a werewolf right there in my hometown. It was obvious to us both over the morning paper. We had plenty of silver bullets. I’d helped with my first werewolf at seventeen. It was somewhere within twenty minutes of my own house. My head was fine and I was twice as fit as my father.

He didn’t take me with him.

* * *

My feet thumped down heavily onto every stair. The bannisters shook with the force of my furious stomping. I wasn’t trying to be dramatic or anything, I was just so angry it burst out of my body and filled up the house, unspoken words hanging in the air.

“Ellie!” Dad called up after me. “Ellie, get back down here!”

I did the exact opposite, marching straight to my bedroom and opening the cupboard. I hauled out my duffle bag, throwing it onto the bed. How much could I fit in it? It didn’t matter. All my clothes were the same anyway. Picking up the bag again, I held it up with one hand and with my other arm, I swept a pile of tank tops off the shelf and directly into it.

Dad didn’t bother to knock. He came straight in, catching me in the process of stuffing a pair of jeans into the bag.

“This conversation is not over,” he said.

“People listen to each other in a conversation,” I said.

He tried to grab the bag, but I swept down first and picked it up. He then tried to pull it away from me.

“You are not leaving this house, Ellie!”

Tugging my things back out of his hands, I nearly fell backwards. “You going to lock me in the panic room?”

“If I have to,” he said. “I am not letting you go out there.”

“You don’t get to decide!” I shouted.

He didn’t respond to that and I went into the wardrobe again. I probably needed something pretty, just in case. And I definitely needed something professional. That reminded me that my fake IDs were in the desk drawer. I could still hear my anger coming out of my feet and slamming into the floorboards.

“This wasn’t the plan, Ellie. College and a life, that was the plan.”

“I changed the plan,” I said.

“You are better than this life!” he insisted. “You are better than this death. And I…”

The doorbell rang. We looked at each other, and at the open window. My room was right above the front door. We had guests and they had definitely heard us screaming at one another.

“It’s your doorbell,” I said. “I don’t live here, as of right now!”

He sighed. Then he took two steps towards me, but I moved out of the way. He was going to the desk in any case. My car keys were there, and he snatched them up before I could stop him.

“Don’t you dare leave this house,” he said.

The doorbell rang again. Just to stop myself from slapping my own father in the face, I walked away from him, out of the room and down the stairs. Not caring that my face was still fixed in a scowl, I ripped open the door so violently, it might have come off the hinges.

“What!?”

I was greeted by two nervous faces. Sam and Dean stared at me and I stared back. Dean was the first to react. While his brother was still gazing at me, his hazel eyes wide and wearing a sad frown, Dean rearranged his face into a grin.

“We brought pie!” he said, thrusting it at me.

It was impossible to keep frowning when Dean was happy. I broke into a smile, but as soon as I did I could feel tears welling up. Winchesters were the last thing I needed. They’d have all their stories, of hunting, driving, eating crappy food in weird smelling diners. Of saving lives and doing something useful. All I had to show for the last two months was a load of scanned pages from occult books. Sam was sure to have brought postcards from places I’d never been. I’d never go, if Dad had his way.

Taking a deep breath to keep myself breaking down, I stepped aside to usher them into the house. Dean walked right past me towards the kitchen, but Sam paused in the doorway a moment. He kept his eyes locked onto mine as he stepped over the threshold and came in. I was uncomfortably reminded that he was psychic. He said the dreams had stopped, and he’d never been able to read minds before, but who knew? It felt like he was right inside my head.

Lowering my eyes, I shuffled to close the door, as Dad came down the stairs.

“Oh, it’s you two,” he muttered. “Great.”

I had gone from burning anger to trying to look normal in a second and it had disconnected me from my surroundings a bit. I looked down at the package in my hand, confused, before I remembered it was pie. I carried it into the kitchen, sniffing it. Might as well comfort eat.

Dean was already at the fridge, adding beer to it from a couple of six packs at his feet. Sam and Dad were in the study, and I could hear them exchanging the usual pleasantries. How are you and what’s new and I definitely was not upstairs having a screaming argument with my daughter.

I put the pie down on the bench and looked for a knife. There was no way Sam and Dean had not heard yelling. They might not have made out any words, but it wasn’t possible to stand on that front porch and not hear the bellowing coming from upstairs.

I cut a generous piece of pie for Dean and an even larger portion for myself, and carried them over to the big kitchen table. After finishing at the fridge, Dean grabbed the forks and joined me. It was cherry pie, my favourite, though it was unlikely Dean had known that.

We’d both had several mouthfuls before either of us spoke.

“How’s your head?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said, through a mouthful. “I’m ready to get back out, just like you said.”

His attention immediately went back to his fork again. “This is good pie,” he said.

I frowned. “Dad told you not to encourage me about hunting. Didn’t he?”

I could see the relief in his face as Sam and my father came into the room. He wouldn’t have to answer the question. Dad went straight to the bar and grabbed the whiskey bottle. He poured half a glass, drank it down and then poured another whole glass. All three of us watched in total silence as he did this, before he finally put the bottle down, picked up his glass and turned.

“What? You ain’t ever seen an old drunk before?”

* * *

Dad may have been annoyed by Sam and Dean’s arrival, but it worked to his advantage. I wasn’t going to storm out of the house while they were there. Dean, being an expert in not talking about anything remotely personal, came in handy. He told me all about Sam’s day of bad luck. He had spilled things, lost a shoe, spontaneously set things alight and been held hostage by a religious hunter who believed Sam was in league with Satan.

Dean also insisted I be the one to change the dressing on Sam’s bullet wound. He was tired of doing it, and I didn’t mind. It meant Sam had to take his shirt off, giving me the opportunity to make a comparative study of his naked torso to his brother’s. For science, of course. My findings were that both of them were hot as hell and the fact they saw me as a sister made the world and cruel and brutal place!

Before Sam’s apparent death, I had promised to watch horror movies with them, so we did that. They were still lame, for the most part. But watching them with someone else made them better. I sat on the floor and let the boys have the couch, but that meant Sam and I had to talk quite loud to hear each other’s (totally valid) criticisms of the films.

“He deserves to die!” I said. “What kind of idiot goes to investigate a strange sound in the woods and leaves his gun behind?”

“He doesn’t know how to hold it anyway,” Sam added. “He’s never gonna shoot straight with that grip.”

“Shut up, dammit!” Dean pushed him off the couch and he was banished to the floor until dawn came and I went to bed.

After a few hours sleep, I headed downstairs to look for my father. I’d had time to cool off and calm down and so had he. Perhaps we could talk about the issue like grownups this time. He didn’t want me hunting anymore and that wasn’t acceptable to me. My restlessness was bad enough normally. I was twenty five years old and I’d still never done that road trip of the lower 48 I’d always planned. A ban from hunting was the last straw. Whatever my father said, I was still ready to finish packing my bag and go, but he deserved another chance. I had decided to go, but I had not yet decided whether to ever come back.

I hadn’t been quiet on purpose or anything. But I always moved softly, just naturally. Dad said I got it from my mom. In my bare feet, I made barely a sound on the stairs and I guess that’s why they didn’t hear me. Instead, I heard them: Dad and Dean, talking in the kitchen.

“Sure, I get that,” Dean was saying. “But you really think she’s gonna budge?”

I stopped on the bottom stair. It was possible he wasn’t talking about me. He might have meant some other “she”. Pausing for a moment, I heard the low mumbling of my father.

“Of course she is, she’s  _your_ daughter,” said Dean.

I crept closer to the door of the kitchen. There was no way they would see me with a wall between us, but I didn’t want them to hear me, at least until I knew where Dean stood. Dad was obviously trying to enlist him to help keep me away from hunting.

“Maybe if your brother talked to her,” Dad suggested and I heard Dean’s deep laugh.

“Sammy? He’s on her side!” I smiled. Of course Sam was on my side. He knew exactly how it felt to have a father try to choose your life for you. Dean knew too. “And so am I, Bobby.”

“The hell with both of ya!” It wasn’t a yell, exactly, but Dad was certainly raising his voice. He had been expecting Dean to side with him and he clearly wasn’t happy to be wrong.

I had heard enough. No longer bothering to tip toe, I marched into the kitchen. “Really?!” I yelled. The expression on Dean’s face would have been funny if I had been any less furious. He looked as scared as I’d ever seen him, including the time we’d closed a gate to Hell.

“Really?” I repeated. “You’re trying to gang up on me now?! Maybe we should call the President, see what he thinks? Or I don’t know, my old Latin professor, or someone else who has NO RIGHT TO MAKE DECISIONS FOR ME!!!”

“Dammit Ellie, I am trying to protect you!”

I pointed to Dean, who backed quickly away from my outstretched arm. “You don’t protect him! You don’t protect yourself! What’s different about me?”

Dean was in a difficult position. My father was in front of one door, I was in front of the other, and he was stuck between the two of us, a deer in the headlights cast by a screaming family row.

“YOU’RE MY DAUGHTER!” Dad yelled. “And I…”

“And if I was your son, we wouldn’t be doing this!” I yelled. If he wasn’t going to own up to it, then fine. But I knew. There was a fundamental difference between me and the Winchesters. There was a fundamental sameness to me and Jo. And he thought Ellen was right to freak out about Jo hunting.

“That ain’t even… That’s got nothing to do with it!” he said.

Dean was still stuck between us, he was looking towards one door and then the other, obviously trying to decide which way was the safest exit.

“Then how come you thought Jo shouldn’t be out there, but you say nothing about Sam or Dean?”

“Well, Jo don’t know what she’s doing!”

He had definitely stepped in it and he knew it. I saw it in his eyes even as I leapt on it. “So, do I know what I’m doing? Well who taught me everything he knows!?”

I knew he had no genuine argument to keep me out of the hunting life, because he resorted to guilt-tripping.

“Elenore, I love you and I don’t want you…”

“I already told you I’m leaving,” I interrupted him. “I just came down to figure out if I’m ever coming back. Guess not!”

Without another word, I turned around and stormed back upstairs, slamming the bedroom door behind me. It would take me five minutes to get dressed, maybe ten more to finish packing and I was out. Fifteen minutes, that’s all. Then I would be out of the house and away from the constant suggestion that I wasn’t good enough. I’d be free.

I was almost done when there was a nervous knock on the door.

“Go away!” I yelled, stuffing a couple of bras into the duffle.

“Ellie, it’s Sam,” he called.

I sighed. Part of me was always happy to talk to Sam, but part of me was terrified. The worst thing I could imagine, in that moment, was Sam telling me he thought my father was right. What if he said he didn’t think I should be hunting either? Dean had said he was on my side, but I was afraid anyway. It was just like Envy had said. I was jealous all the time, constantly afraid that everyone was better than me. Sam was definitely better than me. A better hunter, a better researcher, a better person. And I was terrified he would realise it.

“Fine, come in,” I said.

He came through the door, closing it softly behind him. He had those eyes again, the sad puppy eyes that made me feel like I’d done something wrong, even when I hadn’t. I immediately felt guilty about the less than civil tone I’d used. Then I had a sudden urge to cry. I plopped heavily onto the bed, determined not to be anything other than angry.

Sam gestured to the space beside me and I moved the duffle bag out of the way so he could sit next to me. When we were kids, we would both sit cross legged on the bed, facing one another, while we played snap or just talked. Now we sat side by side, and he towered over me, where before I was always at least a half-head taller.

He didn’t start out with sympathy or questions or explanations. He just launched right in. “Okay, so… what if you came with us?”

I stared at him in shock. “With you?”

“The Impala’s got more than two seats,” he said, with a shrug.

I started to laugh. Sam might want me to come, but his brother was another thing altogether. There was a difference between Dean agreeing I should be allowed to hunt if I wanted, and wanting me hunting with him. A huge difference.

“Yeah, Dean would love that!”

“Dean’s fine with it,” Sam said.

I was suddenly deeply suspicious. Dean would absolutely not be fine with it. Dean liked me, I was sure, and he liked spending a couple of days with me. But full time, in the back of his car, sharing every meal, sharing motel rooms? Listening to what he called my “annoying monkey voice”? No way. Not without coercion.

“Did my Dad put you up to this?”

Sam sighed. “Yeah. But I think it’s a good idea. Everyone wins, Ellie. You get to hunt and Bobby knows this way he’s got some chance of seeing you occasionally.”

That was true. On my own, I’d have maybe called Dad from time to time to let him know I was okay. I was angry, but I wouldn’t be cruel and let my father worry about me when he didn’t have to. But Sam and Dean came to see Dad on the regular. It was insulting to know Dad thought I couldn’t take care of myself, but on the other hand, back up is always better. He’d worry less and I’d know I could come home without being imprisoned in the panic room.

“How do you guys win?” I asked.

“We get you,” Sam smiled.

I smiled back. Trust Sam always to tell a sweet, but obvious, lie. “Well, I think you’re getting the worst deal. But okay.”


	19. Chapter 19: Roadtripping Rules

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is one of the team now, but Dean has a series of important rules she has to follow. Also… it’s awkward when you share a motel room with brothers and they’re both smokin’ hot.
> 
> This Chapter takes place just before 3x04

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I’m thinking Ellie got added to the cast as a regular for Season 3.

I stayed at home one more night. It was a tense time. Dad spent all day and half the night taking the Colt apart. Now all the bullets were gone, it wasn’t good for anything but reverse engineering. Dad thought if he could pull it to bits he might be able to work out how Samuel Colt had made it in the first place.

In the morning, I tried to talk to him. I wanted to say I appreciated him compromising with me, and that I loved him. But my attempts to start the conversation were met with grunts and one word answers. I gave up with a sigh and went to join Sam at his laptop. He thought he’d caught a case in Ohio, and when he showed it to me, I agreed. There were the usual demonic omens, weather wise, and there’d been two violent incidents. Individually, neither of them was anything much, but with the omens, it was worth checking out.

Dean thought it was a long shot, but he obviously didn’t fancy hanging around the house while Dad was giving me the silent treatment. And so, he hauled my duffle downstairs and into the back of the Impala. Sam had hold of his computer as well as mine, as we stood in the kitchen.

“Okay, come on!” Dean said. “It’s a two day drive.”

I looked at Dad. He looked at me. Dean was moving towards the door in an agitated manner. He hated emotional scenes. I didn’t care. Dad had agreed to this, even suggested it. He hated it, but he’d made a compromise because he didn’t want me to hate him. Of course he had. That’s why I _wouldn’t_ ever hate him.

I rushed forward and almost collided with him. I felt a little teary, leaving him. But he’d be okay. If I just treated it like a regular case, the goodbye would be easy. I’d play it like I was going to Iowa for an easy haunting.

“I’ll call so you know I’m okay,” I said. That’s what I always promised before a short trip.

He kissed the top of my head. “Be safe.” That was what he always said.

I let him go and started moving towards the door, but he hadn’t said goodbye to Sam and Dean yet.

“You idjits look after her, you hear me,” he said, staring down Sam and for a moment, I believed he could kill with his eyes.

“Of course we will,” Dean said. “We’ll treat her like a sister.”

Dad frowned and this time he had a glare just for Dean. I had seen that glare once before, directed at my junior prom date. “You better, boy.”

Dean looked deeply offended at the suggestion he would ever regard me with anything other than chaste and brotherly affection. That he would even think like that made me feel a rush of affection for my father. Despite ten years of evidence to the contrary, Dad continued to believe that I was too beautiful for boys to resist. I smiled and turned back to him again, stretching up to kiss him on the cheek.

“I love you, Dad.”

He would normally resist such a display in front of Sam and Dean, but I could see the growing red in his face from the effort of hiding his emotions. “Love you too, baby. Now get out of here, all of ya.”

I followed Dean out, just daring him to comment about my father being openly affectionate. But he didn’t say anything about it. He opened the driver’s side door before turning to me. “First of all, Sammy rides shotgun,” he said.

I nodded agreement. That was totally fine with me. Practically bouncing into the backseat, I waited patiently for the boys to be ready. Sam handed the computers back to me and I put them safe on the seat next to me. I was sitting behind Dean, but leaning over to my right so I’d be able to see out the windscreen.

Sam smiled at me as the engine started with its loud purr. “Anyone would think you’d never been in a car before…”

“I always come right back, Sam! Since college, it’s been salt it, burn it, kill it, come home. Out on the road, for who knows how long? Not knowing where I’m headed til I get there? This is living!”

I clapped my hand over my mouth as a high pitched squeak came out. I hadn’t meant to squeal like that, but the excitement had overtaken me, and I’d reverted to a nine year old. This was nine year old Ellie’s dream, after all. Riding all over the country, no permanent home and going where the hunt was. Little Sam Winchester had wanted my home and my school, stability and friends. He’d told me about his life and I’d listened, sympathising and commiserating. But secretly, I’d wanted it. I wanted my Dad to take me to a different motel every night, to see all those little towns in the postcards he brought home.

“Rule two,” Dean said. “No squealing.” He turned to Sam. “It’s like riding with a howler monkey, Sammy.”

Rule three was that I never touch the radio or even complain about the music. I assured Dean that I had no reason to. Our journey down the interstate was accompanied by AC/DC and I had no problem with that. I even offered to sing along.

Sam laughed. “I have heard you sing, Ellie. Rule Four should definitely ban that.”

“Fair enough.” My singing voice was worse than appalling and I was at peace with that. We all have strengths and weaknesses and I was pretty confident Dolly Parton didn’t know how to take off a vampire’s head with a machete.

Just after midday we pulled off at a roadside diner. Dean and I both needed the bathroom, so it was left up to Sam to find us a booth. When I came back, the boys were seated opposite one another at a table in the corner, reading the large laminated menus. I grabbed the nearest seat, next to Dean, and leant over to look at the large print text. I was definitely going for the burger. It had bacon and two kinds of cheese!

The waitress was a pretty blonde, and she had no uniform, just a tight apron over her short skirt and white button-up top. She was busty, and I saw Dean’s eyes follow her around the diner until she came up to our table.

“Hey there,” she said. She had an unexpected Southern accent that made me wonder what she was doing in a highway diner in Iowa. “What can I get for y’all?”

“I’ll have a burger,” said Dean and I, in perfect unison.

The waitress smiled, and looked at Sam. “What about you, hon?”

“A garden salad, thanks,” he said. “And a coke.”

“You guys want a drink?” The waitress turned back to Dean and I.

“Black coffee,” we said, at the same time.

She wrote it down and crinkled her nose. “Y’all are such a cute couple,” she said, before turning her back on us and walking away, hips swinging.

“Oh hell no!” Dean shoved me sideways. “You, go sit next to Sam.”

I laughed, but he was completely serious, holding his forefinger up to my face in a severe warning. “Rule five. Don’t ever look like my girlfriend.  _Ever_.”

Still laughing at his annoyed tone, I got up and moved, Sam shuffling aside to give me more room. He was also chuckling, highly amused by his brother’s outrage.

“I know she’s out of your league, Dean, but there’s no need to be bitter about it.”

Dean pulled a face at Sam, but then looked at me. “I mean, obviously you’re not… I just meant…”

His awkwardness only made me laugh harder. I wasn’t a nervous teen with a crush anymore, but I was actually surprised by how little I cared what Dean thought of me. What had I written to Sam that time I was drunk? I only have time for two kinds of guys: one good night and happily ever after? Dean was definitely the first kind but if we slept together, it would just be awkward. So, what did it matter if he thought I was attractive or not?

“I’m sure if Dean had to date a squealing howler monkey, I’d be in his top ten list,” I said.

Sam laughed. “Top five, at least.”

* * *

We stopped for the night at a roadside motel near the Indiana-Ohio border. This was perhaps the most exciting part for me. I had never gone on a hunt so far from home that I couldn’t travel there in one day.

It was late when we stopped. Sam and Dean explained that sometimes they would take turns and drive through the night, but other times it was better to stop a few hours out and get into town mid-morning, ready to start on the case.

“Are you sure you don’t want your own room?” asked Sam, as I hauled my bag in.

“Seems like a waste of money,” I said. “But if it’s weird for you…”

Dean was last into the room, immediately throwing his own bag onto a bed. “Not weird. And saves us a third each for beer money.”

“Good point,” I said. Saving money for beer is pretty damned important. “Gonna be a rush for the shower tomorrow, though.”

“One of us could shower now,” Sam said.

I agreed that made sense, and offered to always shower at night, if it kept the whole arrangement smooth. Sam was completely accommodating to me, but I was fairly sure Dean had only agreed to let me come as a favour to my father. I didn’t want to push my luck or make his life any more difficult than necessary.

I nearly had to fist fight Sam for the right to sleep on the tiny sofa, but in the end he agreed. He was way too tall for that to be comfortable or sensible, and in any case, I could sleep like a log anywhere. Maybe in Ohio I could buy a bed roll so I could take the floor in rooms that didn’t have a sofa.

I discovered the problem while I was looking through my bag for something to sleep in after I showered. It was early July, it was hot and at home I’d been sleeping in nothing but a tank top and underpants. That was not going to cut it anymore. I was going to have to either boil to death or buy some pyjamas. I looked through the bag, not noticing the shapes my face was pulling.

Dean flopped down onto the sofa next to my bag, the TV remote in his hand.

“All your clothes are the same, Ellie. It can’t be that hard.”

I looked up. “I don’t own pyjamas.”

He stared at me for a moment, blinked and then turned back towards the TV, turning it on.

“Nope. Not thinking about that.”

Sleeping in denim shorts was not a comfortable prospect, but I didn’t see any other option. I sat on Sam’s bed, clothes balled up in my lap, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom. He did, and we stared at one another for a moment. I’d never met a guy under fifty that wore actual pyjamas, and Sam was not an exception. He was wearing boxers and a t-shirt that was stretched a little tight across his expansive torso.

He had stopped dead in the doorway, and I saw the distinct hint of pink around his cheeks. Hot damn, he was well built. His broad shoulders looked like they’d been sculpted out of marble. Getting up quickly, I hurried past him and into the bathroom.

I could hear them talking. Dean was making no attempt to lower his voice, and I could hear him over the television.

“Arguing about the sofa?” Dean scoffed. “You should have offered to share the bed.”

“Shut up, Dean.”

“She sleeps naked, Sammy.”

“Dean!”

I was tempted to call out that I could hear them, but part of me really wanted to hear what else they said. It was a shameful, vain part of me that liked the thought of them talking about me. I figured they viewed me as a sister, and there was something gratifying in knowing that wasn’t entirely true. I was never going to act on my attraction to either of them, but still… Everyone wants to think they have some degree of sexual allure, right?

Still, Jo and I had occasionally said some fairly explicit things about Dean, and I’d hate to think of him overhearing that. So, with a nervous blush I was glad they couldn’t see, I did the right thing and called out.

“You guys know I can hear you, right?!”

After a brief pause, Sam’s voice called back. “God! Ellie, I’m sorry!”

Sam didn’t really have anything to apologise for, but I’d made my point. I thought the whole thing over while I was showering. Maybe it was for the best I’d heard and that they knew it. Perhaps it was worth having a conversation about? But how would that go down? “Look, guys, you’re both hot as hell, but I don’t think it’d be a good idea to bang either of you. So if you’ve thought about me naked, that’s pretty flattering but doesn’t really mean much. Now let’s all just agree to work together like grown-ups. Good chat.”

I had always been a pretty up-front person when it came to sex, but that was a bit much, even for me. Better to just go back out there with a bright smile and a casual air, kick Dean off the sofa and go to sleep.

I couldn’t sleep with wet hair, so I had to use the crappy motel hairdryer to try and get it at least mostly dry. I had such thick hair that it took longer to dry than to wash. Finally satisfied with a light damp that would soon dry out, I hung the towel up and went back out into the room. Sam was in bed, looking at his phone, but he glanced up as I came out.

“Sorry, was the hairdryer loud?” I asked.

He shook his head, and looked back down at the phone again.

Dean was still watching the news, probably looking for anything that might be suspiciously demonic. Hunters may tend to be outside society, but we’re always well informed. Newspapers and nightly broadcasts are the best ways to find a case. As I came over, he turned the TV off.

“Well, unless a cat singing Zeppelin is an omen, Indiana was demon free today,” he said.

I pouted. I always love the weird story at the end of the news. Sometimes it actually leads to a case, but sometimes it’s just funny. “Aw man! I missed a singing cat?”

“Singing is a strong word,” Sam said, from the bed. “But the reporter seemed pretty excited.”

“Damn thing yowled like it came straight out of Hell,” Dean said. “Frickin’ murdered Stairway.”

There was a pillow and thin blanket on the sofa next to Dean, and I very much doubted he’d been the one to put them there. I sat down, propped the pillow up against his shoulder and pretended like I was going to just lie down whether he moved or not. He took the hint and got up.

The sofa was not that long, but I was able to fit on it by curling up a little. That was generally how I slept anyway, lying on my side, my knees pulled in. Facing the back of the sofa was like having a wall and it felt sort of safe and cozy. Although it was hot, I always needed some kind of blanket over me. I was bound to have kicked it off by morning, but for the time being it would help me sleep.

“Night boys,” I called out, once I was secure in my sleeping cocoon.

“Night Ellie,” said Sam.

“Rule Six,” said Dean. “We aren’t the Waltons. I’m not doing good night and good morning every damn day.”

I laughed. Dean was just looking for reasons to find me irritating.

“Rule Seven is screw you. But good night Sam!”

“Good night Ellie,” he said again, a chuckle in his voice.

I couldn’t hear what Dean mumbled to his brother as he turned the light out, but if I had to guess, he was either complaining about me being a howler monkey or calling Sam a girl.

* * *

Sam woke me in the morning, with coffee. He was already dressed in his fed suit, but I could hear the shower running. Dean wasn’t going to come out in a towel again was he? That had been so awkward. Sam must have read my mind.

“Don’t worry. I made him take some clothes in with him.”

I took the coffee from him with a smile. It was even white with two sugars, though I didn’t know when I had ever told Sam how I liked it. As I took a sip of coffee, Sam explained the plan. He and Dean would pretext as insurance investigators, hence the suit, and look into the suicide at the church. That left me to look into the hobby shop killing spree. We had another six hours drive to get there, but it wasn’t eight o’clock yet, so we would make it by early afternoon if we got on with it.

While I waited for Dean, I had a look into the news reports about the murders I’d be investigating. An apparently normal joe father of two had walked into a hobby shop and shot five people dead before local cops had taken him down. He had no violent history and no known motive. That sort of thing does sometimes happen, of course, but it was worth a look, especially when it happened the same hour as Sam and Dean’s church suicide.

Realising this job would require a respectable outfit and tidy hair, I sighed. Dean came out of the bathroom right before I’d finished my coffee (no pants, but at least he had a shirt and boxers on). I asked Sam to find out the address of the killer’s widow and headed into the bathroom to get dressed and get my hair under control.


	20. Chapter 20: Undercover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and the boys start trying to unravel the mystery in a small Ohio town. 
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 3x04

The boys dropped me off outside a super average suburban house. The lawn needed a mow, there was a tricycle and a soccer ball in the front yard. It was just the sort of house my friends lived in growing up. I wasn’t very old when I realised most kids don’t live in a scrapyard.

My fed get-up was not ideal in the heat, and I was glad to get inside the house, where there was air conditioning. The lady who let me in was not the widow, Mrs. Perkins, but her sister. She explained that she was staying a while, to help out and be with her sister. She suggested I sit down and went upstairs to get Mrs. Perkins.

The poor woman looked exhausted, and no wonder. She had suddenly become a single mother, and given her husband had murdered five other people before his death, she was probably in shock. No doubt in a town this size, the neighbourhood would all know her, too. As she sat down on the couch opposite me, no make-up and sweatpants, I found myself hoping her husband had been possessed. But then, what difference would it make, since she would probably never know that.

The sister went upstairs to supervise the children, and said to call if we needed her.

“Jenny says you’re FBI?”

“That’s right, Mrs. Perkins. I am so sorry to bother you during this difficult time.”

She actually smiled. “You know… you’re the first cop to say that to me.”

The police interviews must have been harrowing for her. That wasn’t fair. There was no reason to assume she had anything to do with her husband’s actions, even if he hadn’t been possessed.

“I’ve had some experience with this sort of thing before,” I told her, and I was not technically lying. “I know you’ve been over it all repeatedly, but with these incidents, the FBI needs to tick some boxes.”

She just nodded.

“Had you noticed any odd behaviour from Tony, before the incident?”

She sighed and nodded again. “He was a different man. He used to be such a great dad. Our girls are five and nine. They were everything to Tony. He was busy during the week, long hours. But Saturdays were time for the girls. He took them out every week, and they took in turns to pick. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for them. But the last couple of months… He stopped taking them out. He’d come home late or not at all. Short with the girls, if he talked to them. Didn’t want anything to do with me, either.”

That sounded like the behaviour of a man who’d been possessed, but there were normal things that could cause it, too.

“Do you know what he was doing? Those nights he didn’t come home?”

She shook her head, but then nodded, reaching for the tissues on the coffee table. “Not for sure, but I think so. Money started disappearing. From our joint account. Whenever I asked him about it, he’d get angry.”

She blew her nose loudly, her face red and tears started to well up in her eyes.

“You think he was gambling?” I asked.

She nodded again and I gave her some time to compose herself. It was possible he’d developed a perfectly ordinary gambling problem and that was the reason for his behaviour. More than once, I’d seen a potential case turn out to be a normal human tragedy.

“Was there anything else? Drinking, maybe?”

“Drinking… Other women, I think. We were together since high school. I thought maybe he was just bored, you know?”

That was an old story, but there was a pretty big stretch from being bored with your marriage and stuck in a rut to shooting up a hobby shop.

“This new behaviour… Was it a gradual decline, or did it seem to happen all at once?”

“I guess… all at once,” she said. “Actually, it was very sudden. Overnight, even.”

“He just woke up different one day?” I asked, my interest captured. “How long ago was this?”

“Maybe two months?” she said. “I remember he’d taken the girls to a carnival on Saturday and they can be exhausting, so we went to bed early. Sunday he wouldn’t come to church.”

Now I was well and truly interested. “No church?”

Putting down her crumpled pile of tissues, she pulled out a few more. “When I asked why, he told me to shut up. I figured he was sick. He could be grumpy when he got sick.”

“But it didn’t get better?”

“He went out that night,” said Mrs. Perkins. “And that’s when it started.”

People’s lives could certainly descend into gambling and drinking, but not overnight. That was usually a gradual decline. Being father of the year on Saturday and a gambling lecher on Sunday sounded much more like possession.

Two months ago, we had seen that Devil’s Gate open. The odds of this being a coincidence were pretty low.

I didn’t see any reason to bother poor Mrs. Perkins any further. I was convinced her husband had been possessed. What I didn’t understand was why he hung around the family for two months, before finally going on a killing spree. For that matter… how had the cops managed to shoot him dead? If he’d been possessed, he should have been bullet proof. Unless the demon had smoked out and left poor Tony Perkins behind to take the bullet.

I called Dean, and he reported that they were just about done too. Mrs. Perkins offered to let me wait inside until my “colleague” came to collect me, but I didn’t want to be in the way. I waited on the nature strip, sweating even with my jacket off.

When the boys pulled up, I slid into the backseat gratefully, and pulled my hair out of its bun, took of my shoes and started pulling off my stockings.

“So, what do you got on hobby shop psycho?” asked Dean.

* * *

As we made our way into town, we compared notes. Sam and Dean’s church suicide guy was much the same story as mine, if not more extreme. He’d sung in the church choir, even. Then about two months ago, he’d changed personality, apparently overnight.

“But how did they die?” I asked, as we walked through the motel corridor, my shoes and stockings in one hand, my duffle in the other. “I mean, your guy shot himself and my guy got shot by cops. If they were possessed, how did that kill them?”

“I don’t know,” said Sam, as we reached our room. He began to unlock the door, and just as he opened it, the door across the hall opened too.

Sam and I went in, but Dean stopped outside. “Richie? I don’t believe it.”

I was curious about who Richie was, but it was much more pressing to get my fed clothes off. I took my duffle straight into the bathroom with me.

When I came out, Sam and Dean were talking to the mysterious Richie. He looked shady, even for our life. Judging by the snippet of conversation I’d heard, he was a Hunter, but he looked more like he scalped tickets in Vegas.

“Hey there,” said Richie, with a very obvious up and down scan of my entire body.

“This is Ellie,” Dean said. “Hunter pal of ours. Ellie, Richie was just saying he’s got what we got.”

“Let’s just say there are demons possessing people in this town,” said Sam. “You know, raising hell…”

“Yeah, but why would a demon blow his brains out?” asked Dean. That was a question I hadn’t considered when I was wondering how. Why?

“Well, for fun?” asked Richie. “You know, he wrecks one body, moves to another. You know, like taking a stolen car for a joyride.”

“Makes a kind of sense,” I said.

“Anybody else left in the town that fits the profile?” asked Dean. “You know, nice guy turned douche? Still breathing.”

“There’s Trotter,” Richie said.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Well, he used to be head of the Rotary Club,” explained Richie. That put him on par with the church choir guy and the perfect dad. “And then people say he turned bastard all of a sudden. Brought in the gambling, the hookers. He practically owns this whole town.”

One guy was responsible for bringing all that sin into the town? That sounded pretty suspect.

“So, where can we find him?” I asked.

* * *

Richie went his own way and we went ours. This Trotter guy owned a bar in town and he would be there in the early evening, so we had time to kill. After changing into his usual jeans and t-shirt, Dean turned on the TV. Sam got out his computer, and I decided I might as well make use of being in the centre of town. I went shopping.

By the time I came back with a bed-roll, pyjamas for different weather scenarios and a super-hot red miniskirt I got for a serious bargain, the boys were about ready to head out. I was sweaty from my shopping trip in the heat, so I made them wait, figuring I might as well wear my new skirt. Looking as hot as I could possibly manage was always helpful when I went to a bar for a case.

“Hurry up, Ellie!” Dean called through the bathroom door.

I yelled back. “Do you want an average Ellie, or do you want a sexy Ellie who can get barflies to tell her anything?”

There was a long pause. “I want the second thing.”

“Damn right, you do!” I called, opening my little make-up kit. I didn’t have much, just a few essentials I could use whether I was “Agent Singer” or I was going for more of an evening look.

After less than ten minutes, I was out. Dean was pacing the room and Sam was still at the table. They both looked up as I came out. They stared at me for a moment, neither of them saying anything. I raised my eyebrows.

“You look, uh… good,” said Sam.

“Smooth, Sammy,” Dean scoffed and Sam shot him a death-glare.

I rolled my eyes, because it was perfectly obvious from his eyes that Dean thought I looked pretty hot, too. That was the whole point of the outfit. I had gone to effort to look good. Picking on Sam because he had, however awkwardly, acknowledged that, was hardly fair.

“Dean, please! You know I look hot. Let’s go,” I said. “And there’s no room for a gun in this outfit, so you two better be ready if I need you.”

I should have bought a pair of knee high boots. At the very least, I could slip a knife in one of those. Actually, you could sew a kind of sheath into one. That’d be cool, plus heavy boots were better than flats if I needed to kick something. High heels were out of the question. Impossible to run in.

It wasn’t a long drive to this Trotter guy’s bar. It was so early in the evening, there was still light out, but the area looked like it had been busy for hours. People were drinking in the street, making out against walls… This was not the dull recession-hit town that Sam’s research had suggested.

Dean parked the car and all three of us got out. Trotter’s bar was crowded and lively. Those who weren’t drunk were well on their way. This was definitely Dean’s kind of place and he moved confidently ahead of me. Sam was next to me, a little less enthusiastic about our surroundings.

“Not your kind of crowd?” I asked. Sam was hardly a homebody, and he liked a few beers as much as anyone, but I doubted he was into loud parties.

He shrugged and we followed Dean towards the bar. We were spotted pretty quickly by Richie, whose idea of dressing to impress was a silk shirt over a white singlet. Dazzling.

“Oh Richie, look at you!” said Dean, obvious amusement in his voice.

“Hey,” Richie said and they traded macho handshakes.

“Bringing satin back?” asked Dean.

“Oh you like this? Try Thai silk, Canal Street. You’d have to pay $300 for threads like these, easy. Cost to me, forget about it!”

I snorted. His shirt was nineteen bucks off the rack at an outlet mall, by the look of it. It was a mystery how he could have misconstrued my derisive face, but he nodded at me, eyebrows raised.

“I can get you a great deal on some lingerie, sweetie. The classy stuff.”

I could see Sam’s shoulders shaking, but he had a completely neutral expression. I don’t know what my face looked like, but Richie took a step backward.

“That’s her grateful face,” said Dean. “Really. So, where’s this Trotter guy?”

Richie pointed. “That’s him over there.”

Trotter was like the anti-Richie. His clothes were certainly not off the rack, and he was dressed all in black, but not a suit. Classy dress shirt. He was bald, late forties, maybe a little older. He was not unattractive for his age, and judging by the number of women around him, owning half a town is a pretty potent aphrodisiac.

“Sits there all night,” said Richie. “Can’t touch him.”

To me, that sounded like a challenge.

“So what do we do now?” asked Sam.

Dean grinned. “Don’t know about you guys, but I’m gonna do a little investigating with that bartender.”

No surprise there. She was smoking hot. Long black hair, dead straight, fabulous lashes. I would have killed for her figure.

“Easy,” said Richie. “Me and her, we got a little somethin’ somethin’ lined up for later.”

Dean smirked. “Yeah, right.”

“Stings, don’t it?” asked Richie, before heading off to the bathroom.

Sam finally was able to laugh aloud about the whole exchange, but Dean was morally outraged by the thought of Richie with that gorgeous bartender.

“No way he gets a girl like that! I mean, look at her. You could fit that ass on a nickel.”

My immediate thought was that perhaps Richie had spoken to her respectfully, but that seemed unlikely. I satisfied myself by giving Dean a disapproving glare. Before he could defend himself to me, he found he had worse problems. An actual priest was sitting right beside him, a glass of scotch almost finished.

“You think so?” he asked.

Dean’s awkward face would be enough to keep me amused for three or four weeks. Sam was apparently getting just as much joy out of it as I was. Looking back over at Trotter, I decided now was a good time to split off, sad though I would be to miss Dean’s attempt at chatting up the bartender in front of a priest.

“I’m gonna have a crack at Trotter,” I told Sam.

He looked over his shoulder, and nodded. “Be careful.”

I headed through the crowded bar, weaving my way between gyrating bodies. It wouldn’t do to walk right up to Trotter like I was looking for him. As I headed in that general direction, I took in the environment.

Trotter had his own little booth, and he shared it with three women. Suited men stood nearby, clearly bodyguards. They were at attention, scanning the room for trouble. I adjusted my walk a little, pretending to be a little unsteady on my feet, and allowed the crowd to push me into the nearest guard, a bulky black guy.

He didn’t move at all as I backed into him, but he did hold a hand out to steady me.

I giggled. “Oops! Sorry, sweetie.”

“Are you alright, Miss?” he asked, as I adjusted my top. Oh, look at that, in the course of adjusting my ruffled clothes I was suddenly showing more cleavage!

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just needed a little air, you know? Is it okay if I stand here a minute?”

He nodded, classic stern business-like bodyguard.

I looked around me as though I hadn’t already scanned the whole bar six times over. “Place sure is crowded, and it’s so early! Must be hard keeping order. You’re a bouncer, right?”

“Bodyguard,” he said.

Feigning surprise, I looked around again, before pointing to Trotter, just behind us. “For that guy? Is he famous or something?”

“He’s the owner,” said my new friend.

I turned back to look at Trotter again. He was looking at me now, not listening to what the girl next to him was saying. I gave him my best attempt at a star-struck smile.

“It’s a great place,” I said, loud enough for Trotter to hear if he was listening. “You know it’s good if the owner drinks here, right? He’s only gonna want the best for himself.”

Bingo. As I was apparently rambling, Trotter made a beckoning motion and the bodyguard excused himself for a moment. I stayed where I was, continuing to make out like I just needed a bit of space away from the crowd.

In just a minute, he was back. “Mr. Trotter asks if you’d like to sit down.”

“What, in there?” I asked, pointing to Trotter’s booth. Such a surprise! I’m just an ordinary girl out for a night, I absolutely was not expecting this. Golly!

I was led over to Trotter, and the woman beside him even had to move aside a little to make room for me. She did not look happy about it.

“This is real nice of you,” I said. “It’s just so crowded, isn’t it?” He raised one eyebrow at me and I giggled. “Of course, you probably like it crowded, since you own the place.”

“I do,” he said, holding out a hand. “My name’s Eric.”

“Ellie,” I said, shaking his hand. How does a girl from the sticks shake hands when she meets an important businessman? I gave it my best shot and he didn’t seem suspicious.

“Would you like a drink, Ellie?”

I smiled. “Oh sure!”  _Don’t ask for a beer_ , I reminded myself.  _What does this adorable girl from backwater South Dakota drink?_ “But I don’t know what to have! They don’t do cocktails at my local bar back home!”

I was so in character now, I found myself speaking every sentence with a mental exclamation mark. Everything was apparently exciting to whoever it was I was pretending to be.

With one look, Trotter summoned a waitress and ordered me a strawberry daiquiri. This was a good case so far. Free drinks and nothing had tried to eat me.


	21. Chapter 21: On the Case

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and Sam cannot figure out what is happening in town, but Dean is more worried about his friend Richie.

I sat next to the possibly possessed local real-estate magnate and bar owner Eric Trotter. I could just about see Sam above the crowd, and I hoped he was keeping an eye on me. I wasn’t carrying so much as a pocket knife.

The major advantage of hanging out with the bar’s owner was definitely the service. After he ordered me a drink, the waitress moved straight to the bar and I was bound to have a fruity drink within minutes.

“You said they don’t do cocktails back home,” he said. “Where’s home?”

Shit. What was the name of that no-horse town on the way up to Bismarck? It had a little café run by an old lady who made fabulous waffles! I always stopped there when I was headed north.

“Kincaide, South Dakota,” I said.

“Never heard of it. Small town?”

“Hardly even a town,” I said, and that was the honest truth. “But honest, hardworking folks as you’ll ever see.”

“And what brings you here?” he asked.

“Road tripping!” I said, still sticking to that basic principle that the best lies have an element of truth. I realised that this was also the perfect opportunity to account for Sam and Dean if he’d seen me with them, as well as make it clear that I was not alone. “My cousins and I are trying to visit every state.”

“Your cousins?” he asked. “Those two young men you came in with?”

“That’s them!” I said.

My strawberry daiquiri arrived and I took it from the waitress with an excited kind of squeak. Dean might have thought I sounded like a howler monkey, but it seemed like the right kind of noise for Ellie the bumpkin from Kincaide.

I’m generally a beer kind of girl, but I like a fruity cocktail every now and again. “It’s real pretty!” I said, hating myself just a little. I took a sip, and it was actually quite nice. I would happily order one again. “Ooh, yum!”

There was no sense wasting all my time on method acting and constructing a convincing backstory. I was supposed to be figuring out if the guy was possessed. It would be easier to just tip holy water on him, but it wasn’t an option.

I hoped that Sam was watching, in case my questions made him suspicious. There was little chance that Dean was keeping an eye on me, when he had that bartender to “question”.

Taking another sip of daiquiri I went for broke. “So, how long have you owned this place?”

“Two months. Should have seen it before I took over, darling. Hardly one customer a night.”

“Wow!” I said, and I was kind of impressed. He’d pulled a serious turn around in two months. I wanted to ask him about his other sudden ventures, but I wasn’t supposed to know about those.

In high school I had a friend called Tonya. She was one of those girls other girls gossip about and she had what you’d call a “bad reputation”, I guess. Boys liked Tonya, but they didn’t tend to respect her, if you know what I mean. Tonya was actually real nice if you bothered to get to know her, which almost nobody did. She was super generous with both time and money, and she taught me a thing or two about make-up and clothes. She was always trying to fix me up with boys and used to tell me “hike your skirt up” and “laugh even if he’s not funny” and stuff like that. She went to medical school in the end, but that’s neither here nor there, except it proves you shouldn’t judge people.

Anyway, I’d decided long ago that I wasn’t interested in guys I had to hike my skirt up for or laughing at anyone who wasn’t funny. But this seemed like the right time to think back on the advice Tonya had given me.

I shifted on the bench seat a little, pretending to just get comfortable, but sliding a little closer as I did so. Draw attention to the mouth! That was an important tip. I took another slow sip of the daiquiri, letting a little get left behind, so I then had to lick it off.

“Have you always owned bars?” I asked.

Tonya’s little tricks were definitely working. Trotter wasn’t taking his eyes off me. “This is my first venture of this kind,” he said. “Do you really want to talk about business?”

Uh oh. I suddenly realised that Tonya had never taught me how to put on the brakes! If he was a demon, my continuing to question him might make him suspicious. If he was just a middle-aged man hitting on an apparent naïve party girl, I was going to have some trouble getting out of the situation without causing a scene. It would be a bit difficult to walk away now with a smile and a “Well, thanks for the free drink!”

In all fairness, I should have had every right to walk away, but I was pretty sure the world wasn’t fair and rich, powerful men didn’t like being told no.

“It’s all just so interesting!” I said.

“If you’re really interested in how I do business, perhaps I could take you back to my office?” he offered. “Show you around…”

Oh shit. That meant what it sounded like, right? I was used to men like Ash or Dean who wanted to bang you and straight up said so. I was kind of awkward at the whole coy pretence thing.

I had a moment of absolute blind panic, wondering what Tonya would have done. Before I could respond, however, trouble went down and it had nothing to do with me.

A gunshot went off, and Trotter, myself and everyone else in the place turned immediately towards the pool table. A man had just shot another, directly in the face. People in the crowd screamed, Trotter got to his feet and two of his bodyguards began to move forward, as the gunman placed the gun under his own chin.

A dark shape collided with him, pushing him to the ground. It was Dean, drawing attention to himself in classic Winchester style. But Sam… oh Sam! He was trying to be subtle about it, but I clearly saw him take out his flask and flick holy water onto the gunman. There was no result, no steaming. As people rushed out of the bar, the struggle was easier and easier to see.

The man said something to Sam and Dean, but I was too far away to hear it. Sam shouted for someone to call 911. Trotter looked at Sam and Dean, and then down at me.

“Aren’t they your cousins?” he asked.

I put down my daiquiri and flashed what I hoped was a confident smile. “Typical,” I said. “Always gotta be heroes.”

Then I hurried across the room towards my super heroic cousins. Trotter’s henchman types were right behind me, and at first I worried something had made him suspicious. Maybe he’d seen Sam with the holy water! But they went for the gunman, relieving Dean from holding him down.

Dean got onto his feet, with a casual nod to the guys now pulling the gunman back up. He moved back towards the bar, and Sam quickly put an arm around my back and led me back over too.

After calling the cops, the bartender had disappeared somewhere, leaving the three of us sitting at an empty bar. Most of the other patrons had cleared out, but it would look weird if Sam and Dean tried to leave before the cops came.

“You okay?” asked Sam.

“Fine,” I said.

We sat nervously, trying to look normal and probably failing. The cops came to take the gunman away, and spoke briefly to Trotter and one of his bodyguards. Then they spoke to Sam and Dean, while I waited nearby, anxious and confused. If that guy hadn’t been possessed, what was his deal? I heard as the boys told the cops he’d said something about the victim sleeping with his wife. Was this just an ordinary murder?

As the guy was led away, Sam sat back down beside me, Dean perching on the stool on his other side.

“Too many cops here,” Sam muttered. “I say we roll.”

“Just be cool,” Dean said. “Poor jerk. Only thing possessing him was a sixer of Pabst.”

“What about Trotter?” Sam asked me.

I shrugged. “Maybe. Hard to say since I didn’t know him before. But I didn’t get the vibe.”

What did I know? I hadn’t even been able to tell that Sam was possessed and I’d known him since childhood.

“So, what’s the deal?” asked Sam. “People in this town possessed or not?”

“I dunno,” said Dean. “Maybe it is just what it is… town full of scumbags.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” Sam sighed, as a uniformed officer came over to us.

“You boys ready for your mug shots?”

Sam and Dean immediately looked guilty. Those were the faces of guys who had good reason to fear the law. It was sort of cute that even when they’d been the heroes they were still worried about getting arrested.

The cop quickly explained what he meant. “The photographer’s gonna be here in a few and take your picture for the local paper.”

Dean looked genuinely relieved to me, but his smile and laugh were clearly false. “Be an honour, Officer. What a thrill!”

As soon as the cop left, Sam got to his feet. “Yep. Time to go.”

Dean and I got up too and we were about to make our way to the door when Dean stopped us, pulling on Sam’s arm. “Wait a second, wait a second?”

“What?” I asked.

“Where’s Richie?”

* * *

Sam drove, while Dean tried calling Richie. It was a short trip back to the motel, but he managed to call four times, with the phone ringing out every time.

“Calm down,” I told Dean, as we got out of the car. “He said he had a thing with that bartender. Maybe he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

Dean frowned, as though the idea was too ridiculous to even contemplate. I had to admit it was pretty far-fetched that a woman that gorgeous would genuinely be interested in Richie, but who knows? Each to their own.

We knocked on Richie’s door, across the hall from ours, but there was no answer.

“You’ve left messages,” Sam said. “Let’s get inside and try to figure this out.”

Dean didn’t feel like sitting down with us and hitting the research. It felt too much like not doing anything, he said. Realising we hadn’t eaten anything, I suggested he get take-out. He seemed grateful for the suggestion and took his cell phone with him “just in case”, but we all knew he was going to keep trying Richie.

Sam turned his computer on and I did the same with mine, leaving it on Dean’s bed while I went to change into something a little less constricting. It was a nice skirt, but I had to concentrate on not flashing people all the time. I decided I might as well have a quick shower, and by the time I came out in my pyjamas, Sam was deeply engrossed in something on his screen.

“Something exciting?” I asked, but he shook his head as he looked up.

“Not really. Just trying to figure out if there’s something that could cause all these guys to flip out.”

I decided to stretch out on Dean’s bed. I could always move if he asked me to, and I didn’t have my own bed, or even a sofa. I hauled my laptop onto my knees, wondering where to start searching. I had scanned some of Dad’s books on demons. But it was starting to look like this wasn’t about possession.

“Well, what’s the common factor?” I asked. “All men, all used a gun…”

“Unless you count Trotter,” Sam said. “Who seems to have had the personality shift, but without hurting anyone. Or at least, without shooting them.”

“In public,” I added. “All three guys went nuts with a gun in public.”

“It doesn’t seem like a demon thing,” Sam said. “Why don’t you see if there’ve been other incidents? Maybe in nearby towns? And I’ll look for something that might be making its victims do this.”

“Something that can induce anger,” I suggested, but then I remembered the suicide in the church. “Or despair, maybe?”

But neither of us found anything, except a general increase in violence and crime for the whole town. If we hadn’t killed and exorcised the seven deadly sins, I’d have guessed they had something to do with it, but this was something else. It couldn’t be coincidence that the town had started to turn around the same time the Devil’s Gate had opened. Could it?

* * *

Eventually Dean came back, bringing boxes of Chinese. We ate, we researched, we worried. There was still no sign of Richie and no figuring out what was going on, either. We all went to sleep late and woke early, because that’s what you do when you’re on a case. I went to grab coffees and breakfast while the boys were showering, and we ate quickly.

“Still nothing from Richie,” Dean said, hanging up his cell for the fifth time. “That’s it. I’m hacking his GPS.”

I thought he was probably right to be worried. It had been nearly eighteen hours since we’d seen him. He wasn’t in his motel room, he hadn’t answered his phone or even sent a quick text. Dean had concerns about his competence as a Hunter, and Dean knew his stuff.

“You want us to come with you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You two hit the library. I’ll call if I want backup.”

Sam and I wanted to look back over old newspapers to see if there was anything historically that resembled recent events. The thought had occurred to Sam while showering that it could be a case of ghost possession. All that gun crime might have been a ghost reliving its death somehow. I wanted to see what had been going on locally two months ago. Perhaps it was just coincidence all these people had flipped out when the Devil’s Gate opened.

Dean borrowed Sam’s computer to look for the cell phone while I knocked on Richie’s door one more time on our way out. Still no answer. Sam and I walked the short distance to the library, still throwing out ideas. Nothing about this case seemed to make any sense.

“We could call your father,” Sam suggested.

This was exactly the point in a case where the brothers would usually call my Dad. Then either he would already know exactly what it was and scold them for being so stupid, or he’d recruit my help and we’d start hitting the books.

This was hardly my first case without my father, but it was the first time since he’d so begrudgingly allowed me to hit the road with the boys, and I kind of wanted to prove I could do it. Or we could do it, a great team, not needing to call my father every ten minutes. For Sam and Dean to call him for help was different, though I couldn’t exactly articulate why.

“Let’s see what the library turns up, first,” I suggested and Sam gave a little smile, as though he had read my mind.

The library didn’t turn up much at all. I found nothing to account for mass personality change and Sam found the normal amount of gun crime for the population. None of the cases closely resembled any of the three recent shootings, either. We sat side by side at that reading table for three hours, occasionally exchanging frustrated words, before Sam’s phone rang.

He fumbled a little to answer it, sheepishly avoiding the glares of the librarian (classic humourless tweed-clad old lady).

“Dean, what’s up?” he said, in a half whisper. Like it mattered! We were the only ones in the whole place, apart from the walking stereotype at her desk. “Ah, shit, really? Yeah that… that sounds kinda demonic.” That was worrying. Judging from Sam’s tone, it didn’t sound like Dean had found Richie alive and well. “We’ll meet you there. I’m sorry, Dean.”

I started to pack us up, organising my newspapers back into a neat pile and closing the huge file. We hurried back out into the street and once we were out, Sam filled me in. Dean had found Richie a little way outside of town, dead. He’d been stabbed and his neck snapped.

“180 degrees kind of snapped,” he specified.

It took something pretty strong to do that. A demon was a good bet. Dean had remembered Richie’s claim that he had planned to meet that sexy bartender, and she had disappeared shortly after the thing with the gunman went down. It could be that she was the demon. His plan was to meet us back at Trotter’s bar, and talk about the case and missing Richie. If she heard us, maybe she would try to seduce Dean as well, in which case, he’d be ready for her.

“So, we pretend we haven’t found Richie, and you and I find a way to peel off, leave Dean unprotected?”

“That’s the plan,” Sam said. “You armed?”

I had a knife in my back pocket, but I never carried a pistol unless I was sure I’d need it. I felt sufficiently armed for most situations. A gun wouldn’t be much help if I got cornered by a demon, anyway, but an iron knife covered a good swathe of possible monsters.

“Do you seriously always prefer a knife to a gun?” Sam asked, and I nodded. “You’re insane.”

“I prefer plucky and resourceful.”

“Actually insane,” he repeated.

“Bold and daring?”

“Insane.”

“Hands-on?”

“Definitely hands-on. Which, since you could just carry a gun, makes you insane.”

Was he flirting with me again? It was always hard to tell. His brother’s style of flirting was obvious and he had a very particular smile he used for it. Dean’s flirting smile made you want to take your pants off. But Dean kind of flirted  _at_ you. Sam always flirted  _with_  you, but given he was friendly with me all the time, it could be hard to tell.

“Fine, I’m insane,” I said. “But in an adorable kind of way, right?”

He laughed, but didn’t reply.


	22. Chapter 22: Pissed Off, Then Panicking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean wakes some angry memories of Ellie’s, but when he goes missing, she soon forgets about that.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 3x04

We had a bit of a walk to get back to the bar and Dean was already there. He had a large burger in front of him, but hadn’t started eating it yet. When he saw us coming in, he grabbed his cellphone and made a call. I guessed he was pretending to call Richie again.

There were two bartenders on, though it was still early. I went to sit with Dean while Sam ordered beers. Dean hung up with a pretty genuine sounding sigh as Sam came back. I guess it was kind of genuine, since he now knew Richie was dead.

“You do realise there’s red meat within striking distance, right?” Sam asked.

“How many times I gotta tell Richie?” said Dean. I was facing the bar and that sexy dark-haired girl was definitely close enough to hear us, if she wanted to listen. “He’s gonna get himself in trouble.”

“Hey, maybe he just bailed,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, even though we all knew the truth. “He might not be missing at all.”

“He’s a moron,” said Dean. “I mean, he’s a sweet moron, but he’s not a coward. He wouldn’t just bail.”

“We’ll find him,” I said.

“I don’t even know where to start, Ellie,” sighed Dean, picking up his beer. “Maybe I should just get drunk.”

This was Sam’s cue to put on his “responsible one” voice. “Dean, come on. There’s something going on here and we need to get on it.”

“Yeah? Well maybe I don’t wanna get on it,” Dean said. “Maybe I want to forget about it.”

We finished a beer each, while Dean polished off the burger. Then Sam stood up, a process which can sometimes take a while, given his height. “Well, I’m gonna work,” he said. “Try trailing that Trotter guy.”

This was a genuine surprise. We were already focused on the bartender and there didn’t seem to be much reason to worry about Trotter anymore, except that he’d exhibited the same weird personality change as our other cases. Dean looked up too. Sam and I were supposed to find a way to disappear, but this was obviously not what he had expected.

“You still think he’s our guy?”

Sam frowned. “I dunno… something about him. The way he was looking at Ellie last night…”

“I think he’s just a garden variety creep, Sam,” I said.

“Well, I want to check him out anyway. You stay with Dean and… you know…”

That was cute. A nice little bit of business, there. Sam was playing it like he was worried about Dean getting trashed. As he disappeared, though, I wondered how exactly I could get myself away now so that Dean could be alone and a target for our potential bartender demon. If I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, it would be a bit strange for me to leave right away.

“He’s gone,” said Dean, raising one eyebrow. Then he did it. He flashed me the smile and I realised Dean knew  _exactly_  how to stage a convincing retreat from me.

“Yep,” I said. “Hey, listen… Are you okay? You know you can talk to me, right?”

Dean stood up, grabbing my hand as he did so. “We should go.”

“Go where?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea what he was going to suggest.

He bent down a little, his hand sliding across my waist in a way I kind of wished wasn’t pretend. His lips brushed against my ear and it was hard to look pissed off because my inner fifteen year old was absolutely losing her shit.

_Oh stop that!_ I told her as a knot formed in my stomach.  _This doesn’t mean a damn thing!_

“Push me and storm off,” he whispered.

If the teen Ellie still inside me was happy, there was another part of me, deep down in there, that was angry. Dean was happy to flirt with me and comment on my clothes. He would pretend to hit on me for a case. But in reality, he really did think I was an irritating howler monkey. Sure, I could joke about it, because that’s what I had to do. I laughed at him when he treated me like an annoying sister. Because I knew that he would flirt with anyone, but he only meant it for girls who looked like that probably-possessed bartender. He’d never mean it for me.

And that made me mad at him, mad at myself for even caring and mad at the world because she looked like that and I looked like me. It was something deep in me that felt that way, and I don’t mean deep because it was far down, layered over with a million other thoughts and emotions. It was deep because it was old and strong, fully entrenched inside me and so much a part of me it would never let go. It had been there ever since I had first started noticing boys and realised that they weren’t noticing me. Part of that was Dean’s fault and in that moment I didn’t care if he’d been sixteen at the time.

I got both hands onto his stomach and let my anger fuel it as I pushed him.

“You’re disgusting!” I yelled, and stormed out of the bar, still feeling a deep knot of anger in my stomach.

* * *

_Okay_ , I thought to myself, as I walked back towards the motel.  _What the hell was that?_

It was just a weird little moment, that was all… It didn’t mean anything. I definitely didn’t have a crush on Dean anymore. Sure, he was good to look at. Damn good! But that wasn’t the same thing. I didn’t care what he thought about me, not really. I only cared because it reminded me of other men and other times. That’s all.

Dean flirted with me, but he didn’t really like me at all. Like Harry in Freshman year of High School. He pretended he liked me, but really he liked my friend Laurie and he knew I could get him closer to her. Like Mark in Sophomore year who asked me out just so he could stand me up because the basketball team thought it’d be funny to mess with the pasty girl with bracers and awful hair. Like a host of guys in Junior year who didn’t like me at all, but figured that if I hung out with Tonya I’d be easier than a pretty girl. Like David, my boyfriend in Senior year who really needed new parts for his car and dumped me six weeks before prom and took Maya instead, in his totally awesome car, I might add. Or even like Jeremy, the guy who  _did_ take me to prom because three other girls had said no and who I slept with anyway because he may not have really liked me, but he liked me enough.

Dean was like the nine guys I dated in four years of college. Not one of them had thought I was ugly, or boring or mean or stupid. High school had taught me never to tolerate anyone who liked me for my friends or because they thought I was easy or because my Dad had plenty of car parts. I’d learned to look for better, and those college boyfriends had all liked me for me. But every single one had left me for someone prettier or more interesting or nicer or smarter. Dean was like all the one night stands I’d had with Hunters since college. I was always good enough because I was there.

And that, I realised, as I stomped my way across the motel carpark, was why I didn’t care what Dean thought of me. Why I wasn’t insulted that he called me a howler monkey. Because one day, he would get bored or drunk or depressed and I would start looking good enough. When that moment came, I didn’t want fifteen-year-old Ellie in control. I wanted grown-up Ellie in control so she could remember about Harry and David and Jeremy and be able to say “No, Dean. I deserve better.” The more jokes he made about me being irritating, the more he complained about my voice, the more he called me “kid” to be perfectly clear that he saw me as a sister… well the easier it would be to say no. The easier it would be to remember that being  _good enough_ was not good enough.

Getting back to our room, I tried calling Sam, but he didn’t pick up. Presumably, he was busy trailing Trotter. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So far it looked like Richie had been killed by a demon, probably the bartender, in which case Dean had it under control and would call if he needed me. On the other hand, Trotter was kind of suspect, but Sam was on that. I was surplus to requirements.

In the end, I watched some daytime TV, emailed Jo and resisted the urge to call my Dad. Night was starting to come down when Sam came back.

“Have you heard from Dean?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Nope. What happened with Trotter?”

I didn’t know what to call the expression on his face, but awkward would be somewhere in the right ballpark. “Not a demon,” he said, quickly. “What happened when you last saw Dean?”

Hearing the story of how Dean had pretended to hit on me, Sam got a little series of crinkles in his forehead, before raising an eyebrow at my angry exit. “You think that got attention?”

I shrugged. “I think if that bartender was a demon looking for an in, she had one. I definitely left him looking like a man who needed a drink and maybe some random sex.”

“Dean looks like that all the time,” said Sam. He sighed. “It’s been hours. We should look for him.”

I agreed and rushed to put my boots back on. We hurried out the door and began the walk back to the bar. It had taken me twenty minutes earlier in the day, but we managed to cut it down to fifteen. Sam could probably have taken it quicker, but he was hindered by me and my short legs. It was hardly my fault he was a giant, but I did my best to keep up anyway.

There was still no sign of Dean at the bar, so we split up to ask around. Sam went to the bar, while I spotted a woman I was sure had been around earlier. She had a glamorous-on-a-budget kind of look and the way she watched Sam made me pretty sure she was scoping the bar for clients. She smiled as I came over to her, and I saw a little gleam of recognition in her face.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” she said. “I know you right, you were in earlier with a guy.”

“That’s right!” If she had remembered us, maybe she’d seen Dean leaving, or heard where he was going.

“Never seen a man look more surprised,” she said, as I sat down opposite her. “When you stormed off, I thought he was going to drink himself to death.”

It sounded like Dean had gone ahead with the plan.

“Did you see him leave?” I asked. “It’s just we’re worried about him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry, honey,” she said. “He left with Casey.”

“Who’s Casey?” I asked.

Casey turned out to be the stunning bartender. Obviously I was supposed to be reassured that we couldn’t contact Dean because he was just enjoying a delightful evening with a woman. But unlike my informant, I knew Casey was potentially possessed. Knowing he was with her, and not able to answer his phone, was the very opposite of a relief.

“Do you know where Casey lives?” I asked. “We need to find him. It’s an emergency.”

She reached across the table and put her hand over mine. “Oh sweetie, I know how it is. You two have something, but not what you want, right?”

She thought I wanted to find Dean because I was jealous! If I hadn’t been so concerned, I would have laughed. “No, no, that’s not…”

As Sam came over, she patted my hand lightly, with all the kind concern of an older sister. “Of course not, hon.” She smiled up at Sam, as I got to my feet.

“Thanks,” I said. “We appreciate the help.”

She smiled again at the both of us, before Sam took my arm and quickly led me outside. The other bartender had also seen Dean leave with Casey, but he had known her address. Sam had to part with some cash to get it, but at least we knew where to look.

I stood lookout while Sam broke into a car from a mostly empty lot, and we headed to the address.

It was a crappy little apartment, but I guess bartenders don’t make great money. There was no answer when we knocked, but we hadn’t expected one. The lock was one of the easiest I’d ever picked and Sam went in first, gun at the ready.

Casey wasn’t there, and neither was Dean, but there was a smell. A distinctive smell that we definitely did not want to find there. As Sam peered into a bedroom, I spotted something in the kitchen. A thin dusting of yellow powder, sprinkled along a shelf. I licked my finger and ran it along the line, picking up a little of the residue.

“Sam,” I called.

He had lowered his gun, confident that we were alone, and now he came over to join me. I held my finger up to show him. In one breath, his back straightened, he pulled back his shoulders and he breathed out. He gained at least an inch of height when he was anxious. He was definitely anxious. I could see it in his eyes, and he no doubt saw something similar in mine.

“Sulphur,” he muttered.


	23. Chapter 23: They Need Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team wrap up the case, and Ellie realises that Sam and Dean might need her more than she needs them.
> 
> This Chapter takes place during 3x04

We went back to Trotter’s bar. Sam tried getting another address out of the bartender while I hovered by the wall, calling Dad. I had been reluctant to call him before, but this was about Dean’s life. I didn’t get an answer at home, and I tried his cell, leaving him a message to say I was fine but that Dean was missing and we’d found nothing but sulphur where he should have been.

Sam came back, highly agitated. “I hate this town, Ellie.”

“No luck?”

“None. What did Bobby say?”

As I was explaining that I’d left a message, I noticed someone was watching us. It was the priest from the previous night, the one who had caught Dean making indelicate remarks about Bartender Casey. He was sitting alone with a mostly full scotch. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at Sam or at me or at both of us. I nudged Sam and pointed him out.

“That’s Father Gil,” he said, letting out just a hint of a smile. “Dean and I questioned him about that suicide. Plus, he knows Casey. Come on.”

Father Gil reminded me of a priest in Sioux Falls. He was mid forties, somewhat handsome and quite kind looking. Father Barry back home was real dedicated, super friendly and pretty well known in the community, even to people like me who weren’t Catholic. He was always showing up to community events and did a lot of fundraising for local families in need.

“Hi Father,” Sam said. “Can we talk for a sec?”

“Sure,” Father Gil said, gesturing to the other chairs.

I took a seat next to Sam, but let him do the talking. He’d met the guy before, after all.

“So… that bartender the other night, Casey. You know her pretty well?”

“Since she was in pigtails,” he said, with a nod.

Sam hesitated for a moment, trying to frame his question. “Well, um, she and my brother, they, uh… um… they left tonight. Together.”

“Ah,” said Father Gil. He seemed like a man that knew how to pick his battles when it came to sin. “Well, not that I approve, but they are consenting adults.”

“Right,” said Sam. When he was worried, his whole body seemed to tense up and his jaw kind of clicked. It was a nervous sort of tick and I’d noticed he and Dean both did it a little, but it was much more prominent with Sam.

“I’m sorry. You said brother?” Father Gil asked. “I thought the two of you were insurance investigators?”

Sam had obviously entirely forgotten about his cover. Seeing the fleeting look of panic on his face, I smiled and deflected the priest’s attention.

“It’s a family business,” I said, offering a hand across the table. “I’m Ellie. I’m their cousin. Three brothers and five of their kids in the business altogether.”

He shook my hand. “Oh, really? You all work for your parents?”

“Not all,” I said, still lying on my feet. “Actually, my sister is a nurse. Black sheep.”

“Anyways,” Sam cut in. “Um… so we went to Casey’s apartment and they weren’t there. I… I just have this feeling that they might be in trouble.” He was stuttering a little, thanks to his panic over Dean.

“What kind of trouble?” Father Gil asked, evidently concerned.

“Just… trouble. Look, please Father! I need your help. Is there anything you could tell us about Casey… any place she’d go, maybe?”

“Yes there is a place,” he said. “Let me get my jacket.” He was getting to his feet already.

“No, wait! Wait wait, Father. We can do this by ourselves.”

“Son, if Casey’s really in trouble, there’s nothing to talk about.”

* * *

 

Father Gil drove, which was probably for the best, since it would be hard to explain why the car Sam and I had been using was hot-wired. He made a little small talk as we drove, asking us about insurance, our family business and whether this kind of thing happened often with Dean. Sam’s one word answers betrayed that his mind was somewhere else, but though I was worried, I still had it together enough to elaborate a little, weaving a convincing backstory about our family business, our passion for insurance and my wayward cousin Dean and his scrapes.

The place we were going belonged to Casey’s parents, and Father Gil knew the way well. It was a little distance out of town and there was no way we could have found it without help. The question now was how to get rid of the priest if things kicked off. If Demon Casey had to be put down, it was unlikely this man who knew her as a child would be happy with that. The number of good Catholic priests who didn’t actually believe in demons or exorcism was astonishing. Sure, they believed in it, abstractly, but actually perform an exorcism in front of them and most of them wouldn’t believe their own eyes. I’d heard a ton of stories about Hunters having to step in and do the actual work of exorcism.

When we pulled up at the house, Sam got straight out of the car practically before it stopped and Father Gil and I were not far behind him.

“Dean!” he was pounding on the door, but if anyone was home, they were not answering.

Sam went one way round the house, and sent Father Gil and I the other. I hurried to find another door, sticking to the walls and calling for Dean as I did. Until I felt a hand on my arm.

I turned, wondering what the Father had seen. And then I saw his black eyes. He had been a demon the whole time. Horrified, I wrenched my arm away, realising that Sam was the only one with a gun full of salt rounds.

“SAM!” I screamed for him, ducking the demon’s fist as he swung for my temple.

What happened then was kind of confusing. First, there was Sam, rushing towards us. Then there was a gunshot, but not from Sam and not from the demon. It obviously didn’t hit, but instead just made the demon angry. I was thrown sideways, towards the Impala. The fall was heavy, but didn’t seem to break anything. By the time I shook it off, the possessed priest was gone, and Sam was kneeling over someone.

I squinted through the darkness. “Dad?”

Pushing myself onto my feet, I rushed over. It was my father, looking a little ruffled, but not badly hurt.

“Bobby,” Sam was saying, “How did you know where we…”

“Go!” Dad insisted, handing Sam a gun. Was it the Colt?

As though the whole situation wasn’t bizarre enough, we weren’t alone. A woman appeared, seemingly out of thin air. I hadn’t noticed her before. She had long blonde hair, sharp, pretty features and an irritated expression. I’d never seen her before, but she obviously came with my father. Who was she?

“You heard the man!” she told Sam. “Go!”

Sam seemed as stunned by her appearance as I did, but he managed to get it together and run off towards the house. I looked down at my father, up at the strange woman, and towards Sam. Should I go with him? I couldn’t do much, but surely another pair of hands couldn’t hurt.

“Go on,” Dad said. “I’m fine.”

I got back on my feet and ran after Sam. I can’t have been more than five steps behind him as we raced into the house, down a staircase and towards a caved-in wall. There was a big enough gap for a person, and I guessed Dean had been trapped down there, until the possessed priest had cleared the way to let himself in. Sam had to duck to get through the gap, but he made it, and I picked my way through behind him. Dean, Casey and Father Gil were all in there, so without me, the numbers were even. With me, it would be three against two.

The first gunshot went off just as I got into the basement room. I saw Father Gil collapse to the ground, twitching from the electric effect of the Colt. I didn’t have time to wonder how Dad had managed to make it work without the special bullets. As Casey looked up at Sam in astonishment, Sam pointed the Colt at her.

Dean called out to him, “Sam! Wait!”

But he didn’t. He fired, and the bullet hit Casey, the eerie lightning spitting out of the bullet hole in her head and spreading throughout her body. She collapsed inside the Devil’s Trap that was holding her.

We buried the bodies behind the house. I was unsure what to make of the whole incident. How had Dad known we needed him and where to show up? It was a long drive. Who was the woman with him and why had I never seen her before?

Then there was Sam. It was so unlike him to just shoot a demon dead, killing the vessel. He hadn’t even tried an exorcism! Even Dean had wanted him to hesitate and Dean was generally the more trigger happy brother.

As Dad and I dug a grave for Father Gil, I started with the most pressing question.

“Who’s that woman?”

He stopped digging for a moment and sidestepped towards me. “Her name’s Ruby. She’s a demon. Claims she’s on our side.”

I stared at him, wondering if this was some kind of weird joke. The concept of Dad hanging out with a demon was so ridiculous. And a demon on our side? That made no sense. But there was no sign that he was joking or being sarcastic. His face was deadly serious.

“I don’t understand.”

“She fixed the Colt,” he said. “Apparently she was at Isaac and Tamara’s too.”

This “good” demon was standing and talking to Sam while he was digging. Dean watched them both as he worked, glaring intensely at Ruby.

“So Sam and Dean know her?” I asked.

Dad shrugged. “She says she can help break Dean’s deal.”

I frowned. That’s what I’d say, if I was a demon spy trying to ingratiate myself. “Do you trust her?”

He gave one short sharp bark of a laugh. “No. But apparently Sam does.”

Sam had begun dealing with demons in two extremes. Shooting first and asking no questions at all, and befriending them. I wasn’t sure which one I disliked more.

This Ruby had apparently shown up at our place, revealed herself as a demon and fixed the Colt so it would work with plain ordinary bullets. Then she’d told Dad we were in trouble and zapped him right to us, with the gun, thank goodness.

Dean and Dad went to get the first body and I let Sam follow them, thinking I was coming too. But instead, I approached Ruby. She looked me up and down and I couldn’t tell from her face what she thought of me. She certainly didn’t have a friendly expression.

“So what’s your deal?” I asked. “What makes a demon side with Hunters?”

“Wow, way to leap in with the personal questions,” she said.

It was annoying enough being called out on etiquette by a demon, but worse that she had a fair point.

“Okay. I’m Ellie,” I said, offering her my hand. If she didn’t shake, she’d be the rude one. “Your name’s Ruby, right?”

“Right,” she said, meeting my challenge and taking my hand. She didn’t hold the handshake long, but long enough.

“My father says you fixed the Colt. I don’t suppose he bothered to say thanks?”

This actually elicited a smile from Ruby. “He didn’t.”

“Well thankyou,” I said. “And thankyou for bringing him here.”

She didn’t even give me a “You’re welcome”. I got the definite impression that she did not like me. As Dean and Dad came back with the priest’s body, she walked away from me, to help Sam carry Casey, though he didn’t really need the help. Both bodies were dropped into their graves and we shoveled dirt back over them.

Dad and Dean headed back to the Impala, but I wasn’t done. I took a moment in front of the graves, just to think about the innocent people who’d been killed. I didn’t know the real Casey or Father Gil, but I was sure neither of them deserved to be prisoners inside their own bodies while a demon took the wheel. Then they’d been killed, collateral damage of Sam’s hasty shooting.

* * *

 

The next morning, as Sam finished packing, I sat outside with Dean. Dad had stayed the night, planning to head home in the morning. He didn’t fancy being zapped across the Midwest by Ruby again, and instead planned to take Father Gil’s car. It wouldn’t be the first car he’d had to scrap and avoid police attention, but he’d never been caught with a stolen vehicle yet.

I sat on the bonnet of the Impala, and Dean stood beside me, leaning back and watching the motel door for Sam or Dad to emerge.

“Dean?” I asked.

He looked up. “Yeah?”

“Did you think it was weird? The way Sam shot them both?”

A flash of something was in his eyes as he took a moment to consider, but then he nodded. “It was cold, Ellie.”

I nodded. It was cold. Especially for Sam. Sam had once convinced Dean not to kill a nest of vampires because they weren’t feeding on humans. For him to shoot two demons in cold blood, killing the vessels was… not right.

Dean turned to face me directly, his back now to the motel. “So… back in Wyoming… uh… there was this moment. Yellow Eyes said something to me.”

For Dean to volunteer information, to admit that something was worrying him… that was huge. I looked him in the eyes, to be clear that he had my full attention. If Dean wanted to open up and tell me something, I wanted to encourage him. He kept too much bottled up inside.

“He said that… that maybe when Sam came back, you know, from… wherever… maybe he came back different.”

Sam didn’t seem any different. Apart from the previous night, he’d been behaving normally. Perhaps too normally, given he had come back from the dead.

“What kind of different?” I asked.

Dean shrugged. “I don’t know. It didn’t sound good, though. And the way he killed that Jake kid, and then last night… Ellie, do you think something’s wrong with him?”

Maybe. But I didn’t want to tell Dean that. He needed reassurance. The guy had ten months left to live. He didn’t need to spend it fearing for his brother.

“No. Yellow Eyes was lying. Just trying to freak you out.”

“Yeah,” said Dean, sounding more as if he were trying to convince himself. “Yeah…”

But I wasn’t entirely believing my own words. Demons are notorious liars, but all the same… I was concerned. Not only was there his behaviour but there was this Ruby woman. Sam seemed to trust her and I couldn’t make out why. Did he know something we didn’t, or was there something more sinister going on?

“Dean, if you’re worried, maybe you should ask him. Talk to him, see how he’s feeling…”

His response to this was to frown and I realised it was too much too soon. Sam said Dean had a rule about “no chick flick moments”. He might be willing to mention his concerns to me, but having a heart to heart with his little brother was probably a step he wasn’t ready for. I blamed John Winchester. He’d raised Dean to put up and shut up, and I knew expressing himself was hard for Dean.

“I could talk to him,” I suggested. “I mean, I should anyway, right? The guy died. He probably has some feelings about that.”

The motel door opened and Sam and my father came out together. I hopped off the Impala and Dean saw this as a cue to turn around.

“Thanks, Ellie,” he mumbled. It sounded reluctant, but I knew he was just trying to be quiet and that his thanks really were sincere.

Sam and Dean had a hug each from Dad, before he finally turned towards me.

“You’re still sure about this?” he asked.

I nodded. “So sure.”

I could see the effort in his face as he fought not to frown. Maybe he was hoping that this first case had been enough of a close call to change my mind, but it didn’t. If anything, I was more certain than ever that I’d made the right call in signing up with Sam and Dean.

Because maybe I needed their help and maybe I didn’t, but one thing was definite. They needed me. Sure they were grown men of twenty-four and twenty-eight. They shot and burnt and decapitated monsters on a daily basis. They could wash and dress and feed themselves and all that basic stuff. But no one had really taken care of the Winchesters in years. All they’d had was each other, and while they loved each other deeply and intensely, they deserved more than that.

They needed someone to take care of them. Not their physical safety or wellbeing. I wasn’t going to do their laundry or cook their meals or anything. But I could talk to them, and care about them and show them love. Because neither of them had ever had enough love in their lives. I had plenty to spare.

Dad gave me a hug and a kiss before getting into Father Gil’s station wagon and pulling out of the lot. We stood in a little line, watching him go. I was in the centre, one Winchester on either side of me and I couldn’t resist the urge to get started in my new role as emotional support.

I stretched up on my toes, and pulled myself up high enough to reach Dean’s cheek. I planted a quick peck of a kiss there and before he could react, turned and stretched myself even higher, gifting Sam with a soft cheek kiss of his own. Dad always pretended to be unmoved, but secretly, he loved my signature kiss. That quick show of affection had made him smile ever since I was tiny little girl, before my mother died.

It made both Winchesters smile now.

“What was that for?” asked Sam.

“Funsies!” I called over my shoulder, as I skipped to the back door of the Impala. “Come on! Where we going?”

I looked back at them and the two brothers exchanged a look and then a smile. As Sam threw his bag in the trunk, Dean unlocked the back door for me.

“Anywhere you like,” he said. “Pick a state.”


	24. INTERMISSION

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ever wondered why Ellie is telling this story anyway?

Kevin Tran looked up. He had thought there’d be more. If he was honest, he thought there’d be a romantic element. He’d thought she was going to tell a story about falling in love, and he’d kept thinking that all the way through. That had been the motivation he was expecting to hear about. Instead, there had been a long and detailed story about a little girl and two little boys, and a grumpy but loving father, a demon and a gate to Hell and a sold soul. A big fight, and a demonic town and that had been that. No romance. No revelation.

“That’s it?” he asked. “You fought with your Dad and started hanging out with Sam and Dean instead?”

“Yep,” Ellie said, getting up. “That’s about the gist of it. Why? What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking back down at the tablet again. “Something dramatic, I guess.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised. She had chosen to take care of someone who needed it. And wasn’t that exactly what she was doing now?

Coming over to stand beside Kevin, Ellie slid the tablet across the bench, just out of his reach. Still slumped in his chair, he made a vague effort to reach it, but knew there was no point. Not if Ellie had entered her Mom-Mode. With one hand on each of his cheeks, she tilted his head to look into his eyes. Kevin let her. Ellie was gentle, and kind and she was all that he had. She wasn’t his mother and she wasn’t trying to be, but she cared about him. The last month she had shown him more care and devotion than any mother could ever have the time or energy for. He supposed she had to. She didn’t have anything else.

“You look so tired,” she said. “You need to get some sleep.”

Kevin sighed. “Crowley says I have to finish…”

But Ellie was not having any of that. As soon as the name “Crowley” left his lips, she began to frown and her brown eyes hardened.

“Crowley can’t do squat to hurt you,” she said.

He knew that. Crowley couldn’t hurt him, or Ellie or even his mother. She had explained it all to him; that Crowley was bound by the deals he made and he couldn’t break them, however much he wanted to. She had even proved it to him, slapping the King of Hell across the face, confident in the knowledge that he couldn’t hit her back.

He made threats and he made promises. He would threaten to starve them, and the hunger got bad but never bad enough. Because if hunger made them ill, it would break the contract. He told her all the horrific things he would do to them if the contract ever broke. But Ellie always said that since she had no intention of breaking the contract, that didn’t matter. Sometimes he would come to the warehouse, and just talk. It was the only retaliation he had. Drink in hand, he’d have her read her own contract to him and remind her what she’d given up to make this deal. And that hurt her, Kevin knew.

“Come on,” she said, taking him by the hand.

He was too tired to tell her no, and too grateful. She had sold her soul for his wellbeing. The least he could do was take the best possible care of himself.

There was nowhere to sleep but a pile of blankets on the floor. She had to argue for even that much, telling Crowley that a well-rested Prophet translated tablets faster. She led him over there, helping him to get settled amongst the little nest of rags. He always offered her one, but she never took it. Sometimes when he woke up, he’d find her still asleep on the floor beside him. With her eyes closed and her fingers curled around one another, she looked much younger. Still older than him, definitely, but less worn and frayed. He’d do his best to cover her up, force something under her head, make her comfortable.

Just like every time, he held up the blanket. “You should take one, at least for your head.”

“I’m fine,” Ellie said, like always. “This is my penance.”

Kevin sighed, pulling his knees closer to his chest, trying to fit himself on the blankets.

“You always say that,” he said. “What did you do?”

“I’m a coward,” she told him.

That was all the answer she ever gave. Kevin couldn’t picture Ellie as a coward. Not from the way she fought the Leviathan, and not from the month he’d spent with her in that dingy warehouse. Not from the stories she told.

“Just try and sleep,” she said.

“It’s hard to sleep. Talk to me, tell me another story.”

He knew he sounded like a child, but Kevin didn’t care. He liked the way Ellie told stories. She’d told a lot of them, bits and pieces about a werewolf here or a ghost there. She told him how Dean used to complain about her squeaky voice, but it wasn’t squeaky any more. It was soft, and calm and soothing. Even though she couldn’t sing, sometimes her voice was like music. She always knew what kind of voice to use. She could help him concentrate on the tablet, or put him to sleep or make the dark walls of the warehouse melt away for a while.

“Okay. What about the time Dean got ghost sickness?”

“You only tell the fun stories,” said Kevin. “I want to know why Dean had such hard, haunted eyes.”

“No you don’t,” Ellie said.

“I want to know why Sam looked exhausted all the time.”

“No you don’t.”

“I want to know how you could possibly have been a coward.”

Ellie sighed. “No you don’t.”

“Can I ask you a question?” She nodded, slowly, hesitating. “If I asked Sam and Dean… would they say you’re a coward?”

He regretted it the moment that he asked. He could see that it was painful for her to even think about, that whatever she had done was a memory she couldn’t bear. It had to be. Whatever it was, it had led her here, a place she didn’t have to be, taking care of him and waiting for Hell. What could she possibly have done to make her think choosing this was her only hope for redemption?

“They wouldn’t,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. They’d be wrong.”

“Why?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

“Because Dean didn’t have the facts and Sam…” she sighed. “He sees the best in everyone.”

“How about you let me be the judge,” he said. “Tell me everything and I’ll tell you what I think.”

She’d told him so much already. About her childhood in her father’s scrapyard, about Sam and Dean coming to visit and how she and Sam would play together and draw. How Dean called her “Pipsqueak”. She’d even told him about the crush she’d had on Dean and the way she’d walk around with her cheeks bright scarlet when he was there. He’d been too afraid to ask her what that awkward teen Ellie would have thought had she been able to see the future. He knew that was too painful for her.

She’d told him all about the fight her father had with theirs, and meeting them again, years later. She explained about how they’d worked a case together, closed a gate to Hell together. She told him everything, in detail that would have been mind-numbing from a lesser storyteller, but which, in her voice, with her words, was fascinating. It had taken her all day to tell the story of how she’d come to be hunting with Sam and Dean Winchester in the first place.

But he knew that was barely the beginning.

“Besides,” he said, while she was still considering. “You said Dean only got one year when he sold his soul. How did he get out of that? Did you and Sam find a way?”

She smiled, but it didn’t seem like a happy smile. “Okay,” she said. “You promise to try and get to sleep, and I’ll tell you about Dean’s contract.”

It wasn’t a promise to tell him everything, but it was a start. Maybe this story would lead to another, and another, until she finally told him what she meant when she said this was her penance.

Sometimes when she told him stories, she ran her hand up and down his back, absently. His mother used to do that when he was sick and he didn’t mind. It felt nice. Once or twice, she noticed she was doing it and got embarrassed, saying she was thinking of another time she’d sat telling stories, to someone else. There were tears in her eyes when she said it that made Kevin think he knew who that someone else might be.

Her open palm ran along his back now. When she spoke it was with what Kevin thought of as her “bedtime story” voice. Soft, like the patter of rain on the roof when he lay awake in his bed at home. Sweet, like his mother’s voice when she sang him those old lullabies as a child. But also sad. Her voice was desperately sad as she went on with her story.


	25. Chapter 24: Best Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean humiliates both Sam and Ellie, but at least the shared experience helps them remember something super important.
> 
> This Chapter takes place between Episodes 3x04 and 3x05, but you can think of it as the first of several chapters that will cover one case, like an episode.

I hadn’t been East and I hadn’t been South and when Dean told me I could pick any state I liked, I suffered a serious crisis of indecision. Everywhere I’d ever been, I’d gone there with a purpose in mind. I’d never just driven before, checking the local newspapers for cases as I went. What if I picked the wrong place? What if I chose somewhere and there were no cases to be found? What if I picked a state and Dean hated my choice so bad he never let me pick again.

“Come on Ellie, we’re nearly out of town,” said Dean. “I need to know where I’m going.”

“I don’t know!” I said. “Um…” _Florida? What about Florida? No… New York! But the boys had just been to New York… Texas?_

Sam laughed at me. “You broke her, Dean. She wasn’t expecting to get to make decisions and now she’s freaking out.”

Fine. I would let Sam choose for me. I mentally labelled Florida as number one and Texas as number two. “Okay, Sam, I’m thinking of two states. Pick state number one or state number two.”

“One,” Sam said.

“Florida!” I called out. “Let’s go to Florida!”

I could hear Dean’s chuckle before he turned the music up. Sam turned around in his seat to look at me. “Just curious, what was the other option?”

“Texas,” I said. “Would that have been better?”

But he didn’t care either way. He was just happy that I was happy. And I definitely was. We were going onto the open road, with no plan and no case ready when we got there. We might not even make it to Florida. There could be a case in one of the four or five states we passed through, but that was okay. The whole point was to be surprised, to see what happened and to run with it.

* * *

 

After driving all day (and stopping at a diner with fabulous cherry pie!), we ended up stopping in Charleston, West Virginia. The motel was the same as always, seedy and cheap with awful décor. The guy on the desk found it pretty amusing to see a girl checking in with two men and made implications about me that nearly earned him a punch in the face.

We dropped off our bags and headed across the road, where there was a bar. It was pretty ideal for our purposes: there was food, pool, beer and attractive people who weren’t picky about one night stands. There was every chance all three of us could get lucky.

I was sitting with Sam, waiting for Dean to come back with more beer. We had full stomachs and the beer was cheap, so none of us saw any reason to hold back.

Sam nudged me and directed my attention towards the bar. Dean was pulling the moves on a cute little brunette girl. She was just his type, from what I’d seen. Outgoing, flirty and up for a good time, but without any expectations. Dean’s type was basically girls exactly like him.

“Oh, she’s gorgeous,” I said. “Excellent choice. I just wish he’d bring the beer back first!”

With a winning smile for the girl so she’d remember him later, Dean finally returned, pushing two beers across the table for Sam and I. We had to sit next to each other, on account of Rule Five and the danger of women thinking I was Dean’s girlfriend.

“Is this a typical night for you two?” I asked Sam. “You sit around and watch your brother hit on everything with boobs?”

“He’s watching and learning, right Sammy?”

Sam just smirked into his beer, suggesting that he didn’t need to learn anything from his brother and did fine on his own, thankyou very much.

“That was a tough case,” Sam said, after taking a swig. “Dean’s earned whatever kind of break he wants.”

Suddenly, Dean grinned. His beer still in his hand, he gestured towards me. “Good thing you don’t have a crush on me anymore, huh, Ellie?”

I stared at him in a moment of sheer panic. “What?”

Sam nearly spat out his beer. “What?”

Dean was still grinning, watching my face carefully. “How old were you, twelve? Thirteen? Remember that?” He chuckled. “Adorable.”

I decided to play it cool. Clearly, he was just trying to embarrass me and the best way to get him to stop was act totally nonchalant. “I don’t know, Dean. I went through a lot of crushes. I can’t remember them all.” The first part was true, I did go through a lot. But I definitely remembered them all. Especially Dean, because he was the first one.

“Oh you remember,” he chuckled. He turned to Sam. “She remembers.”

It had never occurred to me, as a teenager or an adult, that Dean had been even remotely aware that I was nuts about him. He generally ignored me completely and I was only fifteen when he stopped coming to visit. My strong urge to be casual was conflicting with my curiosity. How did he know? When did he find out? Or was he just guessing. “This is…” I was going to say “ridiculous” but screw it. I was a kid. Kids have crushes on older boys. I didn’t have any reason to be ashamed of that.  “You knew? The whole time you knew?”

He shrugged and took another sip of his beer. “My Dad told me.”

That had been absolutely the last thing in the world I expected. John Winchester, that gruff ex-marine who thought my Dad was overindulgent for playing with me, had actually sat down with Dean and had a discussion about my schoolgirl crush. “He what? Oh my God!” I was pretty sure John Winchester didn’t know my name! I was just Bobby’s kid. So if he knew, it couldn’t have been because he observed it. He had to hear it from someone else. My father. “Oh God, this is mortifying,” I said, burying my head in my hands.

Sam was possibly more astonished than I was. “I’m sorry. Dad actually  _told you_  that Ellie had a crush on you?”

“Not exactly,” said Dean, still grinning gleefully at my shame. “But it ain’t rocket science. We spend three days at Bobby’s and Pipsqueak here’s not being even a little bit irritating, just looking away when I talk to her and hiding in her room. And then suddenly, Dad’s giving me The Talk: Volume Two. Stuff about treating women right and showing respect and this weird bit about younger girls and it being my responsibility not to take advantage of them and come on! I knew what he meant.”

Oh God. Dad! My own father had betrayed me. “This is literally the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me,” I said. I wondered if I could possibly slide under the table and make a break for the door. I was sure my father meant well, asking John to have a word with Dean, but all the same…

Sam was clearly enjoying my red face just as much as his brother was. He made a sad face at me, but the laughter was in his eyes. “I was your best friend, Ellie! This is such a betrayal. How could you not tell me you were in love with my brother?”

“This is not happening,” I said.

“This is totally happening,” Dean grinned. “You with your messy braid and your overalls, making me cookies and looking away when you gave them to me.”

Did I really make him cookies? I looked back over ten years and yep… yep, I did that. “Shut up.”

Sam’s mouth suddenly opened wide, and his eyes even wider in gleeful, slightly tipsy excitement. He pointed accusingly at me. “Oh my God! You went through that sundress phase… You said that was for a boy at school! You lied to me!”

The sundress phase. That summer Sam and Dean came to stay and I got it into my head that boys like pretty girls and dresses made you prettier. I hadn’t been able to do anything about my face, but I wore dresses exclusively in a radical departure from the norm that everybody noticed. I was such a silly kid!

“I want to die,” I moaned.

“Come on, don’t be embarrassed,” Dean smiled. “You were cute.”

It was just getting worse. I wanted to turn completely invisible. I wanted to disappear entirely so Dean couldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing my horrified face and the blush rising so fast it must have been purple at that point. “You were sixteen!” I reminded him. He was sixteen and I was an annoying little sister type with a screechy voice that he couldn’t stand. “There was no way you thought I was cute. You thought I was a brat.”

“It was funny,” he said, with a fond sort of smile.

Dean might well have become fond of me in adulthood, but he definitely was not when I was a kid. I pictured him laughing behind my naïve little sundress-wearing back. “Oh my God! You were laughing at me!!! I was a little girl, Dean! You were the only grown up boy I knew. It wasn’t fair to laugh at me.”

It wasn’t fair! Little girls do silly things. Like he never did anything silly at thirteen!

“Never to your face,” he said. “I think I deserve some credit for that.”

He did. I could not argue with that. Secretly being amused by me was one thing, but at least it didn’t really harm me that much at the time. To have actually mocked me to my face would have been cruel and hurt me badly. In that respect, he was kinder to me than boys my own age.

“How did I not know any of this?” asked Sam.

“Good thing you didn’t.” Dean’s face lit up even brighter, and I realised he was in a mood to tease, and maybe, if I was lucky, he was moving on from me. “Remember Ellie’s nickname?”

Sam’s face suddenly turned completely ashen. His body stiffened and I saw that little tick of his clenched jaw. “No.”

Pipsqueak. That’s what Dean always called me. Because I was small and because of my voice. “It was Pipsqueak,” I said.

“Only to your face, right Sammy?”

Only to my face? There was something else Dean called me? But how was that embarrassing to Sam? He was now the one with a blush in his cheeks. “Shut up, Dean.”

But Sam had willingly participated in my humiliation and I wasn’t going to help him if he hadn’t helped me. “What?” I asked Dean. “What did you call me?”

Dean took another sip of beer. He looked like he was enjoying Christmas and his birthday all at once. His dreams of brutally humiliating his little brother were coming gloriously true. “Tell her Sam.”

Sam sighed and turned to me as I started to drink from my own beer. “He used to call you Sammy’s Little Girlfriend.”

I stopped, the bottle resting against my lips. “What? Why?”

Sam was looking at Dean with his unique bitchface, a special look that he generally brought out only for his brother, and only when he was behaving particularly shamefully. “Because he’s a dick, that’s why.”

“The way his little face perked up when Dad said we were going to Uncle Bobby’s!”

No wonder Dean was looking so smug and gleeful. He had found a way to humiliate both of us at the same time. Poor Sam was obviously having his childhood embarrassment rehashed and as for me… My very first crush had found me amusing and thought of me as his little brother’s girlfriend.

Sam hated having his childhood brought up at all. Dean must have known that, but maybe he didn’t know why. Because many of Sam’s deepest insecurities and fears he kept secret from his brother. But he told me.

“Because she was my only friend, Dean.”

Dean did not take the hint that this was more than just embarrassing for Sam. It was hurtful. “Hey, I was rooting for you, man,” he said.

I had always thought of my childhood friendship with Sam as a sweet, innocent thing. He wasn’t a boy and I wasn’t a girl. We were just two kids, gender irrelevant. I knew things other kids didn’t, about my mother and monsters and what lurked in the dark. But Sam knew. And he had no friends, no structure, no one he could talk to about his father or his dreams or about the darkness that scared him. The one inside.

Sam was my best friend and I trusted him and now I was finding out that he didn’t see me as a friend at all. “This is not happening,” I said. I didn’t want little Sam to be secretly blushing every time his brother mentioned little Ellie. I wanted us to be friends, just pure, innocent kids who needed each other.

Sam took a huge swig of his beer and slammed it down on the table much heavier than he should have. “Ellie, I did not have a thing for you. Dean, shut up.”

Finishing his own beer, Dean stood up. He chuckled again. “Adorable.”

Then he was gone, off to find the attractive brunette, and leave us to stew in our shame.

I picked at the label on my beer, something to do with my hands so that I wouldn’t have to look at him. “Seriously, Sam. We were just friends, right?”

“Right,” Sam agreed. “He’s being an ass.”

I believed him and at least I could feel better about that. But knowing Dean had laughed at me when I was thirteen and vulnerable still made me want to disappear. “I can’t believe he used to laugh at me. I was so awkward and flustered all the time.”

I heard Sam laugh and for a moment, I was so hurt by that, until he spoke. “Well, the tables have turned.”

I realised that he hadn’t laughed at me at all. He was planning revenge on Dean. I definitely wanted to be a part of that. I left the bottle alone and looked up at him. “What? How?”

He leant over and spoke low, though Dean was certainly too far away to hear him. “Just wear that mini skirt again. And drink a beer. Then we’ll see who’s awkward and flustered.”

I thought back to the other night, when I’d come out of the bathroom in that new red skirt and a bit of makeup. It was my “hot flirty girl” interrogation look. They’d both stared at me when they’d seen it and I’d known in that moment that it had worked. It had been a confidence boost to think I had looked good enough to render them both speechless for a moment.

But what did he mean by “drink a beer?” I drank beer all the time. And how would looking hot be a punishment for Dean anyway? Wouldn’t he enjoy it if I was sexy? He was pretty honest about his appreciation for the female form. So, how could my putting on tight clothes and drinking beer make him as uncomfortable as he’d made me?

Unless…

_The tables have turned?_ Did _Dean_  now have a crush on  _me_?

“What!?” I squeaked. Then I lowered my voice back to Sam’s level. “Are you suggesting that Dean…”

He shook his head. “This conversation never happened.” Then he got up and headed over to the bar.

* * *

We didn’t see Dean again all night and we didn’t care. Sam brought back four more beers, correctly guessing that the little trip down memory lane had been as traumatising for me as it had for him. When he came back, we didn’t talk about it again. We just drank our beers in silence.

Then he helped me hustle some pool. He pretended to teach me, lost convincingly when two guys agreed to play us for money and then bowed out when I put four hundred dollars down. He made a show of talking me out of it, but one of the guys told him it was my money and if I wanted to lose it taking on a pro that was my business.

We ran out the front door fifteen minutes later, four hundred richer and laughing with drunken adrenaline. It hadn’t gotten physical, but the guy and his friend were pretty pissed that we’d hustled them. It was about to kick off when the bartender told us to get the hell out and stop scamming his customers.

Crossing the street back to the motel, our attempt to get back into our room quietly failed spectacularly when I tripped on the doorstep, falling flat on my face. Sam howled with laughter before stepping over me and coming inside. We were both drunk enough that if he’d tried to help me, I’d probably have dragged him down with me. I just crawled over to a bed, while he shut the door, laughing behind his hand.

“You’re so drunk!” he laughed.

“You’re drunk!” I said. It seemed like a genius comeback at the time.

I felt behind me with my hands so I could hold onto the bed to pull myself up. I got my butt up onto the mattress and then fell backward. That was funny to me, for some reason and I giggled.

Sam had shut the door and he now came across the room towards me. “Ellie!” he shouted, before realising there were people in other rooms and we were supposed to be quiet. “Ellie… Ellie… Ellie. I gotta tell you something.”

I managed to sit up again and patted the space next to me. “Sit down. Make yourself at home. Tell me all the somethings.”

“Ellie,” he said again, sitting down. “Ellie… I’m glad you came with us. ‘Cos you’re nice and you’re funny and you’re my best friend.”

Tears welling up in my eyes, I grabbed his hand. “No, Sam! You’re my best friend.”

I obviously had a message I was trying to convey, but while I remembered the conversation the next morning, I had no idea what had been going on in my head. I just remembered being pretty determined to make him understand.

“No,” he said again. “You’re  _my_  best friend.”

I shook my head aggressively, poking him in the chest. “No! You’re the best friend.”

He opened his mouth to argue with me again, but then he held up a hand. Maybe he was a little more sober than me. He’d had more beers, but he was a lot bigger. “Wait, wait, Ellie…” he pointed to himself and then to me, then made an excitable gesture that involved waving both hands between us. “Best friends!”

Yes! I realised he was right. Sam was so smart. He knew about words. He and I were best friends. We were when we were kids, whatever mean things Dean might have said about us. We were best friends. We told each other everything. And then our dads had a fight. I still didn’t know why, but I knew it wasn’t my dad’s fault. It was probably Sam’s stupid dad being a stupid meanie. I never liked him because he made Sam sad and Sam was my best friend. But then we weren’t even friends at all anymore, not even a little bit.

But then he came back. And he had Dean and they had their brother thing and that was good and I was happy they had each other. And I had my Dad. But sometimes you don’t want your family. Sometimes you want your best friend.

And I had mine back again.

“Best friends!” I agreed.


	26. Chapter 25: Thin Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam finds a case in North Carolina, where the trio discover people have been disappearing with no explanation.
> 
> Episode Guide: This happens between 3x04 and 3x05, but you can think of it as the second of several chapters that will cover one case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a 3 month gap between Episodes 3x04 and 3x05. I thought that 3 months was a good time to entrench Ellie as part of the team, so I asked my Tumblr readers for some plot ideas. This one is the work of an Anon called Faye and was a lovely idea. So far, I've really enjoyed writing it. It's fun to take a brief plot suggestion and form it into a full case, figuring out how everything works and making a coherent self contained story out of it!

Bright light. Light was shining into my face. As I woke, there was the distinct sound of someone moaning with irritation. It took me a moment to realise it was me.

There was something heavy on me. I opened my eyes and tried to adjust to being awake. Someone was laughing.

“You crazy kids! I can’t leave you alone for one night?”

It was Dean. Dean was laughing at me. Why?

There was a groan beside me and the world started coming into focus. Something heavy pressing on me? Groaning next to me? Ah shit.

Sam was lying partially on top of me. The previous night was coming back. We’d gotten drunk. Not black-out wake-up-in-a-field drunk. But we had gone through tipsy to the other side. We got kicked out of the bar, but not before we hustled a jerk out of four hundred big ones. We’d come back to the motel and talked for several hours. We’d gone on an extensive trip down memory lane, remembering how we used to sit up in my room. He thanked me for letting him read my books. I apologised for making him play with my dolls and he admitted that it had been kind of fun, getting a chance to use his imagination. He liked the normality of my doll house, with a mom that baked pies and a mechanic daddy (because that was the only kind of job for a daddy that we knew, apart from hunting).

We had eventually gotten onto the subject of my embarrassing teenaged crush on Dean and I gave him all the details I hadn’t at the time. He laughed his ass off and that made me laugh to. I could see the funny side. As an adult, I could be pretty upfront if I was into a guy. As a nervous blushing little dork, I’m sure I was quite sweet, really. I’d made him cookies and wore pretty dresses. Naïve little Ellie, before she got jaded by ten years of the depressing reality of romance.

He complained about Dean’s eating habits, the mess he made, the bad jokes. Then there was a period of intense guilt and tears because Dean had less than a year before he was going to Hell. Because he’d traded his soul for Sam’s. I’d done emergency damage control and promised we’d find a way to fix it. Then I cried. Then he got teary again.

I think we fell asleep after that.

Now Sam was waking up. His arm was thrown over the top of me and his face was pushed up against my shoulder. We were lying sort of diagonally on the double bed, but we were on top of the blankets, both of us fully clothed. There was no way Dean could misconstrue the situation as sexual. He was just being an ass again.

“Shut up, Dean,” I said, gently nudging Sam off me as he groggily rubbed his face.

“I just hope you were safe,” he said, putting three coffees down on the table.

I managed to get to my feet and I offered Sam a hand to help him do the same. “Shut it. The only one here who had sex last night was you.”

Dean chuckled to himself as he went into the bathroom. I winced. That hadn’t really been as brutally cutting a remark as I’d hoped it would be.

“I don’t think…” Sam said, “That… that’s not really an insult.”

Apparently Dean was satisfied with the minimum of mocking for the morning. He did enjoy speaking louder than necessary and once we got into the car, he put the music up as loud as possible. We drove through North Carolina blaring Motorhead. It was pretty agonising, but I’d been through much worse hangovers and it was starting to pass by the time we stopped. 

* * *

 

The sign outside the little roadside diner had promised pie. My presence in the car gave Dean an ally in his constant pursuit of baked goods, and Sam had no choice but to agree to a stop. They had no cherry pie, which is pretty offensive, but there was apple. Sam contended himself with a salad and the local newspaper.

“I’m not saying I hate it,” Dean explained, through a mouthful. “I’m just saying it’s not high on my list of good pie.”

“Don’t even speak to me!” I said. “All pies should be cherry pies.”

This prospect was too horrifying for him to even keep chewing. “Sam! Sam! Did you hear what she…”

Sam held up a hand. He had been reading the paper through our entire argument, ignoring us entirely. I thought he was going to tell us to shut up, but instead he lay the paper down flat.

“Get this,” he said, and pointed to an article as he read it. “Fourth disappearance baffles sheriff. Local man James Barlow, 23, was reported missing in Maitland yesterday, marking the fourth disappearance from the small town within a fortnight. Maitland, a town of just one thousand residents has been rocked by the string of missing persons this month. Sheriff Vincent Miles has appealed for the community to remain calm. _There is no reason to suppose foul play in any of the recent disappearances. All four cases are still under investigation, but it’s very likely this is just a coincidence,_ he said. Mr Barlow, a farmer, was well known in the community. He was reported missing by his parents, who say their son got up to go to the bathroom during dinner and never came back to the table.”

Dean and I both looked up.

“That sounds like our kind of thing, right?” asked Sam.

“Four people in two weeks?” I asked. In a town of one thousand people? It might not have been our kind of thing, but it sure as hell wasn’t normal.

“Worth checking out,” Dean said. “Where is this no horse town?”

I googled for directions and found that Maitland was in the centre of the state, about three hours away. It wasn’t on the route to Florida, but the circumstances of this Barlow guy’s disappearance sounded weird enough that we thought it was worth checking out. Sam went to the car for his computer to see if he could get into the county sheriff’s department and find out how the other three people had gone missing.

He hacked in easily, and found the series of missing persons reports filed over two weeks:

First up had been a 21-year-old trainee hairdresser. She had disappeared while attending a crowded party. Two friends said that she had been talking to them, when they’d turned around, distracted by a drunken argument. When they had turned back to look at her, she was gone. She was popular, had been doing very well at work and was apparently happy in a new relationship. Her parents were concerned, saying she had no reason to leave town, and that she would never have done so suddenly, or without taking her beloved shi-tzu.

The second disappearance was a 49-year-old man. A plumber, he had been on a job when he went to his van to retrieve a part. He never came back into the house and the homeowner found his van outside, the door still wide open. There were no signs of a struggle and no witness had seen him outside the house. His daughter reported him missing, and said he had been depressed and that she was concerned about suicide.

Three days after that, the wealthiest woman in town vanished. She was 39-years-old, married to the guy who owned most of Maitland. She was highly involved in local philanthropy and her latest projects were organising the annual children’s carnival and her attempts to establish a foundation that would provide college scholarships for one local teenager each year. She was reported missing by her husband, who said she was upstairs, getting dressed for a party. When he went up to check on her progress, she was gone. He claimed that she could not have come down the stairs without him seeing her, as he’d been in the living room the whole time, and his chair had looked out onto the staircase.

Finally there was James Barlow, and the report was much as the newspaper had said. He had excused himself to go to the bathroom and never come back. His parents said that they weren’t aware of any conflicts or enemies, that he had been happy and that he was planning to move to Charlotte and go to community college, an ambition they were supportive of. His father had even gone with him to look at apartments the previous weekend.

We got back into the car and backtracked down the highway a little to get to the right turn-off. This was definitely our kind of thing. Four people with absolutely zero in common. They were different ages, different genders, had different jobs and were from different backgrounds. The only thing that linked them was being born and bred in that tiny town.

Sam was pretty interested in the fact that only one of them had any personal problems, but Dean thought that under the circumstances, it was probably just coincidence. The plumber may have been depressed, but that was probably not relevant, since he’d vanished in the same sudden way as all the others.

During the drive, we talked it over. Two people had disappeared in their own home. Two had not. Three had been technically alone, though others had been nearby. One was standing right between two other people, and dozens of others had been nearby. Three had gone missing at night, and one during the day.

“So the plumber maybe got dragged off the street,” Dean said. “And the other two, I don’t know, maybe something was already in the house. But the girl at the party, man… That’s weird.”

“What does that, though?” I asked. “We’re looking for a monster that drags guys away from their van, in broad daylight, mind you. But it also sneaks into houses at night and takes people away without a sound. And it can blend in at a house party.”

Neither of them could answer me. Because honestly… what the hell does that?

* * *

 There was one motel in town. It wasn’t a highway town, there was nothing there to interest a tourist. Nobody else was staying there and we’d had our pick of rooms. We went nearest the exit, of course.

It was still early afternoon. I didn’t fancy getting on my fed suit, but Dean insisted it was the best pretext. Four mysterious disappearances could reasonably attract the attention of the FBI. He was right. But he didn’t have to put on stockings or spend twenty minutes trying to beat his hair into submission.

“You don’t have to come,” he said. “How do we explain three FBI agents anyway? They work in pairs.”

I was prepared for that. The possibility that Dean might try and find ways to avoid taking me places had crossed my mind and I was already filled with creative solutions for his likely excuses.

“I’m not an agent. I’m an FBI sketch artist,” I said. Then another, totally awesome thought occurred to me. “And I work on a freelance basis.”

“Why does that matter?” asked Sam.

“Because since I’m not an employee of the FBI, I’m not subject to dress code. Enjoy your hot sweaty suits, bitches!”

I was in jeans and a tank top, but I threw a button up shirt over the top, to make the look a touch more professional. I already had a sketch pad and pencils in my bag, so I fished them out. I went for a pencil behind the ear, and one in the jeans pocket, and figured I’d carry the sketch pad around. It was only A4 size.

“But what if you actually have to sketch something?” Dean said, adjusting his tie. “An FBI sketch artist has gotta be pretty good, right?”

I heard Sam laughing from behind the closed door of the bathroom and I knew he wasn’t laughing at me. I opened the sketch pad to a good page and turned it around to show Dean. It was a drawing I’d done of my father, just trying out some stuff I’d seen about how to get the shading right for the eyes and focusing on the way the nose and other features affected light and shadow on the face.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean said.

“I got accepted into art school, you know?” I said. “But I went for linguistics in the end, because it seemed more useful on the job.”

He came over and grabbed my sketch pad off me. “Damn, Ellie. You even got his eyes right. He looks like he’s thinking about slapping me.”

“That’s Dad’s neutral expression, alright. Thanks, Dean.”

He gave me my pad back with an approving sort of nod. It was unusual to get approval from Dean, but I didn’t really need it. I knew my artwork was pretty good. It would have been better if I’d done that art course, but I did a bit of learning on my own, and taught myself a thing or two.

Our first stop was the sheriff’s office. We figured it made sense to start by declaring ourselves on the case, and to see what angle the locals were taking on the thing. He may have told the paper there was no connection, but surely the sheriff didn’t really believe that. Four missing persons in two weeks in a town that size? He had to be worried.

We walked in on a pretty chaotic scene. The office was a mess, papers everywhere as well as some soda cans and pizza boxes. Looked like the local law was pulling all-nighters.

One deputy sat at a desk, head bent over a piece of paper. He appeared to be concentrating fiercely and I didn’t blame him. His boss was having, let’s call it a “heated discussion”, with another deputy.

“I don’t care how many times you’ve looked! LOOK AGAIN!” he yelled.

He was late forties, bald but with a full beard, which personally, I don’t think is a good look, but that’s just an opinion. Anyone would agree that his uniform was a mess though. It was crumpled, stained and there were wet patches under his arms.

“He look stressed to you?” I whispered to Sam.

“He’s probably used to graffiti and drunks,” he said, with a nod. “Guy looks like he hasn’t slept in days.”

“Yes Sir, of course… I… okay…” the nervous deputy stammered, staring at his shoes. He looked up, to turn away, and noticed us in the doorway.

Following his eyeline, the sheriff turned and saw us. Two unfamiliar men in suits obviously sent a pretty obvious signal, and it had an effect on him. He straightened himself up, ran a hand over his bald head, and cleared his throat.

He marched towards us, putting on his best veneer of professionalism.

“How can I help you Gentlemen?”

Gentlemen? “What am I, invisible?” I asked Sam.

He smiled sympathetically at me and reached for his badge.

“I’m Agent Scott,” he said, as he and Dean flashed their badges. “My partner, Agent Young.” Then he gestured to me, because even Fake FBI Agent Sam is considerate. “Our associate, Miss Johnson.”

This was obviously the sheriff’s first introduction to federal law enforcement, real or fake, and I could see the sweat on his brow. He looked around the office, and I was sure he was taking in the masses of paper, the pizza boxes and the general tone of disarray.

“Vincent Miles,” he said. “I’m the sheriff here. I guess… you’re here about the disappearances?”

“That’s right,” Dean said. “No offence, sheriff, but looks like you’re a bit out of your depth.”

Sheriff Miles nodded, and let out a small breath, as though it was a relief to hear someone say it. “Yeah, I’ll admit to that. This just… it isn’t the kind of thing that happens around here, Agent.”

“We understand that,” Sam said. “But honestly, you’re not the first town to get hit with something like this. We know you’re not equipped to cope.”

The sheriff rubbed his hand over his face and across his head, with a sigh. “I just… wait, you said there are others?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah, up in Oregon last year and then in Wyoming a few months back. We’re just looking for a pattern.”

“You think… maybe some kind of serial killer thing?” he asked.

“At the moment, we’re just looking for the facts, Sheriff,” Dean said. “Why don’t you tell us about the disappearances?” 

* * *

The times I’d dealt with local law enforcement before, they generally had their own idea about what was going on and how to deal with it. They thought it was a gang thing, or drug-related or they had some local in mind for a suspect. Sometimes they were annoyed at having feds on their case. Sometimes they were eager to impress. Never before had I encountered someone who was just relieved to have the help.

Sheriff Miles was totally forthcoming. He seemed to be hoping he could hand the whole mess off to the FBI and get back to chasing local drunk kids out of the church hall. He went over the steps he’d taken. The missing plumber’s daughter dated the farmer kid briefly and went to school with both him and the hairdresser. But there was only one school in town. The wannabe socialite had her hair done at the salon the young hairdresser worked at. But she would, since there was also only one salon. At one time or another, the plumber had done a job at all three other victim’s homes. Because he and his brother were the only plumbers in town. The victims shopped at the same stores, went to the same church and knew plenty of the same people. On paper they had a lot in common, but no more than any random four people in town.

He had found no physical evidence at any of the scenes. No blood. No scuff marks or signs of struggle. No broken furniture. It was as if all four victims had vanished into thin air. Three out of four had been happy, successful people with goals and plans. They weren’t likely candidates for suicide or running away. The plumber was apparently a drinker and had been very depressed, according to the daughter. The brother and business partner agreed with the drinking but disputed the depression. All four had plenty of friends, but some people didn’t like them. Nothing the sheriff found alarming or motive for murder. A bitter ex-girlfriend here, an unhappy customer there. But very few people go through life without offending someone.

I felt bad for the poor man. He was just a small time sheriff trying to keep law and order in a little town surrounded by farmers. People were panicking and they were already talking about a recall election. He was being called incompetent. Listening as he went over his casework, I didn’t think he sounded incompetent at all. He had been working all hours, examining every angle, trying to find the slightest breakthrough on any one of his four disappearances. But when you got right down to it, what could he do?

Four perfectly ordinary people had simply vanished into thin air.

* * *

**NOTE (PLACED HERE SO I CAN LINK TO TUMBLR):**

Please feel free to follow on [Tumblr](http://winchestersplusone.tumblr.com/). I post each chapter there first, and I also post extra things like deleted scenes and scenes rewritten from different points of view, based on audience requests. There's also a very polite exchange of shipping views happening between my followers. All shipping must be civil and is accompanied by tea, crumpets and a string quartet.


	27. Chapter 26: Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie finds a possible clue, but before she can tell Sam and Dean, something strange happens to her.

FBI associate freelancing sketch artist was the best idea I ever had. While the boys had to sit through three interviews in uncomfortable suits and ties, I was sitting pretty in jeans. As we walked up the path to the fourth house, Dean put his hand back to his neck again, pulling at his tie and rubbing off some of the sweat.

“Next time, you be special agent and I’ll be the sketch artist,” he muttered.

I waved my sketchpad at him. “Gotta bring the talent if you want the gig, pal.”

He knocked on the door and we waited.

We had interviewed the socialite’s husband, the farm boy’s parents and the hairdresser’s mother. None of the interviews had turned up anything helpful. No cold spots, no flickering lights, no mysterious voices, no occult symbols, no EMF, no supernatural signs of any kind.

The final interview was the plumber’s daughter. It was starting to get dark, but we figured we might as well get it over with before we headed back to the motel and hit the books. It was beginning to look like we would have to call my father for help again.

She opened the door herself, gave Dean the once over and invited us in. She was twenty-one, worked at the local supermarket and also did the books for her father and uncle.

The boys went through the usual procedure of asking typical FBI questions, and she answered them all patiently, explaining that she had already told the police all of it. Finally, Sam got into the real questions.

“Heather, you said in your report that your dad had been depressed. That he was drinking?”

She nodded, expression sad as she clutched at a pillow. “Yeah. He’s always been a big drinker, since my mom died, but lately… Something was eating at him.”

“And that morning, was there anything odd?”

“No,” she said. “No more than… he was kinda quiet and everything, you know? But that’s how he’d been for a while.”

Dean leaned forward. “This is gonna seems like a weird question, Heather. But have you experienced any strange things here in the house? Flickering lights? Weird cold spots? That kind of thing?”

She stared at him. “No. There’s rats in the ceiling, though. Is that relevant?”

“It’s just a routine question,” said Dean, dismissively. “Listen, can I use your bathroom?”

She pointed him towards it and he disappeared. Sam and I were left with Heather, who put down the cushion and grabbed a tissue.

“So, what do you think happened?” Sam asked her.

“I guess… Am I crazy to keep hoping? Like, maybe he’s killed himself, but there’s no body. And with the others going missing too, I keep thinking maybe they all got taken somewhere, you know?”

I could see that Sam wasn’t inclined to believe that. He knew as well as I did that four missing people doesn’t usually mean a happy ending. But hey, maybe a djinn or something had nabbed them and we’d be able to find at least some of them before the worst happened. It was possible.

“We’re doing everything we can to find them.”

“It’s all so weird,” said Heather. “First Kimmy. I was there at the party, you know? How could she just vanish like that and no one saw anything?”

Good question Heather. Very good question.

“Then Dad, and Louisa and now James too! Who could do this?”

Louisa was the socialite. Apart from her husband, everyone else who mentioned her had referred to her as “Mrs. McLane”. Heather was the first to use her first name. She knew her reasonably well. She went to school with Kimmy, dated James and was apparently on first name terms with Louisa.

“Did you know Mrs. McLane too?” I asked.

Heather nodded. “Yeah. I’m on the carnival committee.”

At that point, Dean emerged, and asked his “partner” for a quick consultation in the other room. Sam got up to join him and Heather watched after them, but a red flag had raised itself for me and I had to know.

“So Heather, you know everyone who disappeared pretty well?”

“Um… Not that well. Dad and James, yeah, but I mean, Louisa was just on the committee and Kimmy and I weren’t friends or anything.”

“Seemed like Kimmy was friends with everyone,” I said. The sheriff had painted her as universally loved, pillar of the community, prom queen, everyone’s best friend.

“Not everyone,” Heather said with such hostility that she sounded like an entirely different person to the one I’d just seen interviewed.

“And Louisa,” I asked. “What was she like?”

Heather shrugged. “Don’t know really. Who did you say you were?”

“I’m a sketch artist,” I said. “I’m supposed to be here to help identify a suspect, but seems like there isn’t one.”

“Guess not,” she said. She was glaring at me, apparently unhappy that I’d asked her about Kimmy.

Sam and Dean were coming back. It looked like they were ready to leave, so I stood up. Heather followed my lead, getting up to take us to the door.

“Here’s my card,” Dean said, holding it out and she took it with a smile. The hostility she had shown me was gone.

“Do call us if you think of anything, okay?” Sam said. “Every detail might be important.”

“Yeah, I get that,” she said.

Sam and Dean went out first, and as I went to follow them, Heather made to shut the door. She bumped into me and there was an awkward moment when she had to put her hand on my hip to steady herself.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she said, with half a giggle.

I’d have thought it was a weird come on, if I hadn’t seen the way she’d looked at Dean. “It’s cool,” I said. “Thanks for your time, Heather.”

The boys were already at the car, and I hurried after them, ready to get back the motel and start figuring out what the hell was happening in this town. 

* * *

 

We talked in the car on the way back. Dean had found a small cotton pouch in Heather’s bathroom cabinet. He passed it back to me. It had a pretty strong smell, but pleasant and inviting. It was more like one of those things you put in your drawers to make your underwear smell fresh than a hex bag.

“That’s a thing?” Dean asked. “People do that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Some people. Little scented bags and you put them in a drawer so everything smells nice?”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know why. But some people do.”

I handed it back to Sam, and he put it in his pocket, ready to look inside when we got back the motel. Maybe he’d be able to figure out what was in there and what it was for.

When we did get back, Dean got out of his suit, while Sam preferred to just take his jacket and tie off, unbutton a little and get straight to work. I showed him how to get into the online copies of the books I’d been scanning back home. One of them was a seriously thick spell book. Maybe he’d be able to find some clue about the pouch and what it was for.

“It might just be about the smell, but it would help to check.”

Dean came out of the bathroom in jeans and a t-shirt. The man was almost offensive, really. He looked great in a suit and great not in a suit and absolutely incredible in nothing but a towel. His pecs should have been illegal. I gave myself a mental slap, avoided looking at his butt as he bent over his bag and focused on getting a clean shirt of my own. I figured I might as well shower early and then get into something comfy.

Clean, hair still wet and wearing a tshirt and sweat pants, I was ready to get out and help Sam with that possible witchcraft. It was all we had to go on and it might not have been anything. Maybe it was just keeping the bathroom cabinet from smelling musty. I wondered about it, though. If it was witchcraft, we’d have to head back to the other three houses and see what we could find. Their bathrooms had been snooped as well, but we might have to do a more extensive search.

Picking up my jeans, I was about to fold them up neatly, when I noticed something in the pocket. I didn’t remember putting anything in my pockets? Something thin and flat, and kind of rectangular. I pulled it out.

It was a piece of card, folded in half. About the size of my cell phone when opened up fully, it had symbols written on it. I didn’t recognise the language, but it did seem like writing. There were three lines of symbols, drawn with thick black marker, and some of them repetitive. They might have been letters, but not from any language I was familiar with.

Still, I was a linguistics major and if it was a language, I was bound to have a website bookmarked that would help me read it. How had it gotten there, though? It definitely hadn’t been there when I’d gotten dressed in the morning. It can’t have been, because I specifically remembered finding an old stick of gum in my pocket and throwing it out. That had been the only thing there.

I retraced my steps throughout the day. After getting dressed, we’d gotten in the car. Drove a few hours, stopped at that diner and argued with Dean about pie.  I’d gone to the bathroom and there’d been two other women in there. Could they have slipped something into my pocket in the cramped space?

Then we’d agreed to take the detour to this case, and we’d checked in at the motel. Sheriff’s office, I didn’t go near anyone there. Sam or Dean might have slipped it into my pocket at any time, but why would they do that? Unless it was Sam, trying to secretly communicate with me, but that made no sense, when he could just text me.

Heather! She had bumped into me on my way out the door. Her hand had gone onto my hip and slid a little. I’d thought she was catching herself, but she might have been sliding the card into my pocket. So, maybe it was a message? We’d been alone in the house, though. If she wanted to tell us something, she could just have said it. And when had she had the time to write a note out anyway? Why not write it in English?

I’d show it to the boys and see what they’d make of it. Maybe it was language Sam had seen before. He didn’t have the degree but he had a talent for languages, and I was sure he’d recognise a language if he saw it twice. I moved to pick up my jeans again, but when I tried to touch them, my hand went right through them. Figuring I must be tired and imagining things, I reached for them again. Once more, my hand sailed right through them. They seemed solid enough, but wherever my hand was in contact with them, they disappeared, leaving just the hand.

Confused, I tried to grab the towel instead. I couldn’t touch that either. The shower curtain also disappeared and reappeared as my hand came into contact with the fabric. Something solid, then! I reached for the wall and my hand kept moving. The tiles seemed to shimmer and vanish as my hand passed through them. This was the point where I began to panic. I couldn’t touch the sink, or the door or the shower head. The whole bathroom was on some other plane of existence to me.

“SAM!” I called. “Dean!!!”

Though I had positively screeched for them, no one came. I heard no sound from the other room. Suddenly fearing the absolute worst, I put my hand to the door again. It moved through. I tried putting my foot through it and the same thing happened.

I had to try it. I shut my eyes and stepped forward, through the door.

I emerged on the other side, apparently in one piece. Dean was lying on his bed, looking through his father’s old hunting journal. Sam was still at the table. He had opened up the little bag and held a small blue flower in his hand, holding it up to the screen, presumably trying to compare.

“Hey, can you guys hear me?” I asked, knowing, deep in my stomach.

Neither of them looked up. They just carried on, doing exactly what they were doing.

Dean was nearest me, so I stepped towards him. With a mental apology if it hurt him, I reached out my hand and swiped it through his head. He didn’t notice. He didn’t even blink.

So… I hadn’t died? If I were a ghost, surely my hand going through his face would have affected Dean. He’d have gone suddenly cold, or felt my presence somehow. That’s what people always said about ghosts. I’d had a ghost move through me, anyway. It felt cold and there was something like a mild electric shock. At the very least it was enough to make you blink.

I crossed over to Sam. He and I were best friends? Hadn’t we agreed that? We’d spent so much time together as kids. I had a bond with him that I didn’t have with Dean. If I reached out to him, maybe he’d sense me. Concentrating fiercely on Sam, I put my hand inside his head and left it there.

“Sam,” I said. “Sam… I’m here. Please feel me, Sam.”

He looked up and for a gleeful second, I thought I had actually gotten through.

“So guess what?” he said. I realised he was talking to Dean. “This thing is witchcraft alright, but it didn’t make Joe Klinger disappear.”

“What is it?” Dean asked, looking up.

“It’s a protective thing,” Sam said. “It was warding the house against malevolence.”

“Like, ghosts or demons or what?” Dean asked.

“More like… people. It’s supposed to protect the household from anyone who’d try to harm them.”

“Well it doesn’t work,” I said. It clearly hadn’t protected Plumber Joe.

“A lot of good it did Joe,” said Dean, mirroring my thoughts almost exactly.

Sam just nodded in agreement and went back to looking at his screen again. I came round behind him to look over his shoulder. He was looking at the scanned spell book. The instructions for the protection spell were there, and he was obviously reading through them again. I read them as fast I could, though I missed a few bits as he scrolled too quickly for me.

The herbs were supposed to be put together in a piece of cloth. Then they had to be tied up with thread made from a different kind of cloth. The two kinds of cloth weren’t specified, just that they had to be different. Then there was an incantation and the bag had to be placed in the house somewhere dark.

It seemed like the little bag had been made according to the instructions, and the cabinet in the bathroom was probably dark. Perhaps they hadn’t gotten the incantation right? But who had put it there, Heather or her father?

Anyone who came into the house wishing harm upon its occupants was supposed to be repelled, but there was no explanation of what that meant. Would they be unable to enter?

“Seems like it only protects you while you’re in the house,” Sam said. “Whatever took Joe got him in the street.”

I put my hand on my back pocket, where I had placed the bit of card. No! Joe hadn’t been taken in the street! He hadn’t been taken at all. He was still here, somewhere! He was just invisible, immaterial and silent, unable to communicate with those around him. What was happening to me must have been what happened to our four victims. That’s how Kimmy had been able to vanish at the party. She must have found herself suddenly unable to touch anything or be seen by anybody. There was no sign of a struggle at any of the scenes, because nothing had happened. No one had been abducted or killed or eaten.

We’d just been… slipped out of the visible universe somehow. Maybe we weren’t dead and we weren’t ghosts, but perhaps we were in whatever dimension ghosts existed in.

And ghosts could materialise, right? Make themselves seen. Maybe I could too.

I spent twenty minutes standing beside Sam, trying to make his beer bottle move. If I could just focus enough to get my hand around it and knock it over, he might begin to wonder. But there was nothing. I couldn’t get even one finger to touch it.

Finally, it occurred to Sam how much time had passed. He looked up.

“How long ago did you last hear the shower?” he asked.

Dean shrugged. “I dunno, half an hour?”

Sam stood up, his left leg passing right through me as he went towards the bathroom door. He knocked.

“Ellie? Are you okay in there?”

“She’s probably just drying her hair,” said Dean.

“Hair dryers make a noise, Dean. Ellie!” he called again. Another knock and he called louder. “Ellie!!!”

My lack of response was enough to alarm Dean, then. He put the journal down and came over to stand beside Sam at the door. He tried knocking too (like that would make a difference).

“Hey! Ellie!” he called.

They looked at one another.

“Should I go in?” Sam asked.

Dean looked uncomfortable. “Yeah. She might be passed out or something.”

At least I hadn’t locked the door. Sam was able to open it from the outside, and he did so slowly, kind of peering through the crack as he pulled on the handle. Then he opened it wider, putting his whole head in. “What the? Ellie?!”

I followed the both of them into the bathroom. It was just as I’d left it, my clothes and my towel on the floor. It was a strange thing to think in that moment, but I knew they were getting damp.. I wished I’d had a chance to pick them up and fold them properly before I went ghost-like. Plus my underwear was down there. I wasn’t that comfortable with them seeing my dirty underwear.

Fortunately, they didn’t really notice, because they were too busy being freaked out by my disappearance.

“Where the hell is she?” asked Dean, moving the shower curtain a little, though he surely knew I couldn’t be hiding behind it.

“Come on boys,” I said. “Figure it out.”

“It’s got her,” Sam said, looking around the bathroom with a sigh. “Whatever this thing is, it’s got Ellie.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While writing this, I got a mental image of Ellie telling stories to Kevin and frequently launching into long, detailed descriptions of half naked Winchesters. Kevin doesn't care, Ellie. Cool it.


	28. Chapter 27: Lonely

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unable to be seen or heard by Sam and Dean, Ellie realises that there might be someone in town she can interact with.

I sat on the motel room floor, watching and listening as the Winchesters went into panic mode. Dean was sitting on the bed again, frantically flipping through his father’s journal. Sam was sometimes at his computer, but then before he could start a search for new information, he’d jump back up again and start pacing the room. He walked through me a few times, but he never seemed to feel anything or get any sense that I was there.

“Dammit, Sam!” Dean said, throwing down the journal. “This is exactly why I said it was a bad idea to bring her with us.”

It’s a good thing I couldn’t touch anything or I would have punched him in the face. At least I knew for sure now. Dean did not want me around.

Sam stopped his pacing and glared at his brother. “No! It’s exactly why Bobby didn’t want her hunting alone.”

I smiled. Sam liked having me there. It may have been a favour to my father to hunt with me, but Sam didn’t mind at all. And he was right. If this had happened to me alone, I would have had even more of a problem. But Sam and Dean would look for me and if I could just find a way to communicate with them, to tell them what had happened, that might help them solve the case.

“Bobby…” muttered Dean. “We gotta call Bobby.”

No! I was so agitated, I actually stood up and marched over to stand beside him. “Don’t you _dare_ tell my father I’m missing, Dean Winchester! Don’t you dare!”

Sam sighed and leant back against the wall. He ran both hands over his face and through his hair. “Should we?” he asked. “What if we panic him and then we find her? She’d be furious.” _Damn right I would_.

“And if we don’t find her?” Dean asked. “If we call him and say Ellie’s been missing three days, but we didn’t wanna worry you?”

He did have a point. Sam evidently thought so too, as I saw a look of fear flash in his eyes. He might have been afraid of me being angry, but the wrath of my father if my life was in danger would be terrible.

He sighed again. “24 hours?” he asked.

Dean took a few moments to consider this. “Okay. You stay here and keep looking into this. I’ll head back to the Sheriff and see if there’s anything we could have missed.”

“I’m thinking witches,” Sam said.

Dean’s shudder was dramatic. “Friggin’ witches! Why can’t they just stab their enemies like normal people?” Sam stared at him for a moment, and so did I. “I mean… not Ellie… I just… you know what I meant, Sammy!”

I couldn’t help cracking a smile. I knew what he meant and I was inclined to agree. Witchcraft was always so brutal. Always using gross shit like baby’s bones and sacrificing sweet furry animals. Witch related murders tended to be unnecessarily violent. They were all about scalding people in the shower or choking them on milkshakes or summoning invisible monsters to brutalise them. Dean was right. Just commit quick, simple murder!

Sam nodded, like he understood and Dean headed outside. I was tempted to go with him, but I wouldn’t be able to sit in the car. The town was only small. Perhaps I could walk to the Sheriff’s office. What would I do when I got there, though? I couldn’t ask any questions.

I needed to find some way of communicating with Sam. Perhaps now he was alone and it was quiet, I might be able to get through to him. I figured he’d go straight back to his computer, but he went into the bathroom. I followed him and watched him sit down in the only place available, perched on the edge of the toilet.

He looked around the room with a sigh. He had that face. He’d always had that face, ever since he was a kid. Some people would call them puppy dog eyes, but they were worse than that. Puppy dog eyes has an implication of being deliberate, but Sam was never like that. He’d never look at you like that to try and manipulate you. He just had so much sadness inside him and sometimes he couldn’t keep it in. It wasn’t that he tried to look sad, it was that he stopped trying not to. He was holding in his sorrow all the time, and sometimes it just got too hard and he’d make that face.

I was seven the first time I tried to hug all the sadness out. I wished I could do it then, even touch him with one hand. But all I could do was watch him sigh. He reached forward, picking up my jeans. He held them up and looked at them a moment and then folded them. I smiled. Classic Sam, thinking about what I’d want.

He gathered my shirt and even my underwear, all folded neatly and then I followed him back into the other room. He laid the folded clothes down on top of my bag, nice and neat, just the way I would do it. The he stood and looked at it for a second, before going back to his computer.

For a few moments, he sat with his fingers on the keyboard, but then he noticed something. My cell phone was sitting on the table. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. What would happen if my father rang? He’d have to answer it for me. Would he tell the truth, if it was before the twenty-four hours he’d agreed on with Dean?

I wondered what would have happened if I’d had my cell-phone on me when I disappeared. Sam would certainly have tried to ring me. Would it have got through? Probably not. Some of the other victims would have had cellphones. Kimmy was at a party and Joe was working. Those were times you’d keep your cellphone on you, and surely someone would have tried calling.

What if they tried calling out? I could interact with the clothes I’d been wearing when I disappeared. And the little piece of card I’d been holding.

The piece of card… I’d been holding it when I vanished! I grabbed it out of my pocket again and looked at the little symbols on it. Could it have been some sort of spell? Maybe Heather had slipped it into my jeans and as soon as I touched it, the spell kicked in?

That made sense. Who else had disappeared? Heather’s father had been outside fetching something from his truck. Heather was his daughter, she could easily have hid the card somewhere in the truck. He might have spotted it and picked it up, wondering what it was.

James and Louisa had both disappeared from their houses, but Heather knew them. Maybe she’d planted it on them too. Louisa had been getting changed, just like I was. She might have found the card in her pocket. Kimmy had been at a party, but her friends had said something about a fight that distracted everyone. Heather had even admitted to being at the party. How hard would it be to walk past Kimmy and thrust the card into her hand while she was looking away? It’s not like she had to worry about Kimmy seeing and making a fuss. She could walk right up and speak to her, even. She’d be no more able to tell anyone Heather was responsible than I was.

So… if Heather was behind this, with her little pieces of card… Why? What was her motive? James was her ex-boyfriend, so I guess that explains itself. But the others were more of a mystery. She clearly didn’t care for Kimmy. She’d been quite agitated when I mentioned what a popular person the hairdresser seemed to be.

Maybe she didn’t need a strong motive. You’d have to be a pretty awful person to use witchcraft to shift your enemies onto a different plane. Pretty vicious and unstable. How much did it take to invoke the anger of someone like that? Not much, given she’d targeted me.

“I don’t know, Ellie,” said Sam. For a moment it seemed like he was responding directly to my thoughts, but he was just speaking aloud. “At least if you’re with the others, you can help them.”

Oh my God! “Sam you genius!” I shouted, instinctively grabbing for his arm. My hands went right through him.

Sam couldn’t see or feel me but maybe there was someone else in town who could! 

* * *

 

I decided on looking for the hairdresser, Kimmy. She had been gone the longest, two whole weeks. We’d interviewed her parents and they were a short walk away from the motel. She had her own place, but if I’d been Kimmy, I’d have hung around my parents, and my dog.

It took about ten minutes to get there at a brisk walk. At least I didn’t have to be cautious. Being raised aware of what could lurk in the dark made me wary all the time. But vampires and werewolves wouldn’t be able to see or hurt me anymore than my friends could. Good thing too, since I wasn’t armed.

When I walked through the wall into Mr and Mrs Barlow’s living room, they were eating dinner. Side by side on their sofa, staring at the television. They both kept their gaze straight ahead, fixed on the seven o’clock news. Every now and again one or the other would glance down at their plate for a moment, to stab a piece of steak or scoop up the peas. But they never looked at one another.

They weren’t alone.

I recognised Kimmy from her missing person’s report. But who else could she be anyway? She sat on the floor, legs crossed, gazing up at her parents. She wore a sparkly halter top and a black skirt, her blonde hair in perfectly tamed ringlets. She was still dressed for the party.

Thrilled that I could see her, I called out without thinking. “Kimmy!”

Hearing me, her head whipped around and she got to her feet in one swift movement. “I… you can see me?”

I came over to her and she reached her hands out towards me. Her left hand connected with my shoulder. She was touching me, and before I knew it, I was being pulled forward into a very familiar hug.

She was holding me so tightly and I realised she was shaking. Over the sound of the television, I heard her sobs. “I can touch you, I can touch you…”

Kimmy must have spent two desperate weeks confused and isolated. She could see her parents and her friends and the police. But just like me trying to reach out to Sam, she could never communicate with them. No one heard her, no one saw her, no one touched her. I put my arms around her and held her back. We sank back down to the floor together, as she became so overwhelmed she couldn’t hold herself up any longer.

“Kimmy,” I said, “It’s okay. I’m here to help.”

Finally, she let me go and in between sobs, she looked into my eyes. She was so pretty, and gave me the sweetest smile. “Thankyou so much. I just… They can’t see me. I’ve screamed and screamed and they don’t hear me. Am… Am I dead?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. My name’s Ellie. I’m a… well, I kind of deal with this sort of thing.”

It was hard to hear one another over the television. Kimmy took my hand and led me into her parents’ bedroom. A little black and white Shih-Tzu was asleep on the bad, nestled in between the two pillows. I tried not to think about dogs. I still got sad about Rumsfeld sometimes.

Kimmy saw me looking at him and choked back tears again. “I just want to give him a cuddle,” she said. “He howls every night. He loves mom and dad, but he doesn’t understand why I don’t come home.”

Neither did her parents of course, but at least they knew that wherever she was, Kimmy loved them. Dogs just know they’ve been abandoned.

I realised all of a sudden how healthy Kimmy looked. “You seem okay,” I said. “You haven’t been able to eat, have you? But you’re not starving to death.”

“I don’t need to eat,” she said. “Or sleep. That’s what made me think I might have died.”

Okay. So, whatever was going on, our bodies weren’t being affected by the passage of time. Kimmy had sensed time passing, but her body hadn’t changed in that time. There was no hunger or fatigue.

“So, you said you deal with this sort of thing?” Kimmy asked. “What _is_ this sort of thing?”

I wished I had more of an answer for her. The truth was, I could make a good guess, but I didn’t know what was happening, or how we could fix it. The best I could do was offer her hope, and that was more than she’d had. “I think it’s witchcraft,” I said. “Look… I’m just going to be straight with you. There’s a lot of stuff out there people don’t know about. Ghosts, that kind of thing.”

“Okay,” Kimmy said. “I mean… I’d say you’re crazy, but… it’s not crazier than this.” She moved her hand through the dresser for punctuation.

“Was there a piece of card?” I asked. “About this big, symbols all over it?”

“Yes!” Kimmy squealed. “I felt someone touch my hand, and then I realised I was holding this thing.” She had no pockets, but she reached down her top and pulled out a little piece of folded card, just like mine. She must have been keeping it in her bra. Smart.

“And that’s when people stopped seeing you, right?”

She nodded again, and I took the card from her. “I was going to show my friends, but when I tried to tap Emily’s shoulder, my hand went right through. I called, and I shouted, but…”

I got my own card from my pocket and unfolded them both. The writing was identical. There were a few slight differences in the symbols, but it looked like that was just because they were drawn by hand.

“What does it mean?” asked Kimmy.

I didn’t know. What I needed, more than anything, was a way to get these symbols to Sam. Or… even if I could get him to find the right alphabet online, I could easily translate it myself. But I couldn’t show Sam anything, or talk to him, or even let him know I was alive.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t recognise the language, but I know I could translate it if I could find the right website.”

Kimmy’s shoulders sank. “But… you can’t use a computer, right?”

“Right. But… I think we’re in another dimension… or a plane. Like ghosts, they’re in our world but sort of not. That’s why they pass through things. Does that make sense? I’m sorry, I’ve dealt with this stuff my whole life, and I don’t know what’s weird and what isn’t.”

Kimmy laughed. “No… No, I get it. You think the spell on the cards made us go somewhere else when we touched it?”

“That’s right. But ghosts can materialise so people can see them. Sometimes they can touch things. I strangled a poltergeist once. They can move back and forth a little. But looks like we can’t.”

“I read that cats can see ghosts, once,” said Kimmy. “But I tried talking to Brutus, the cat next door. He didn’t seem to notice me.”

Kimmy was smart. She’d obviously been thinking pretty rationally about the whole situation and doing what she could to make sense of it. Seeking her out had been a good idea.

“Have you found any way you _can_ interact with anything?” I asked.

She frowned. “Well… if you put your hand through something electrical, it kinda goes fritzy.”

Making radios go static and flickering lights were pretty classic ghost traits. I folded up both the cards and put them into my pocket. “Show me.”

Back out in the living room, Kimmy had me stand in front of her parents, looking at the television. Then she stood beside it, and put her ghostly hand inside. The picture blinked out. Mr and Mrs Barlow looked at each other at last. He sighed and put his plate on the coffee table, ready to get up and fix it. Kimmy moved her hand out again, and the picture came back on.

“See?” she said.

This was good. We could use this. For a moment, I didn’t know how, until a thought formed in my head. “Do it again!” I said. “But like, quick flashes, on and off.”

“Like this?” she put her hand in and back out, then back in, making the picture on the tv flicker, appearing and disappearing in bursts.

I rushed forward and grabbed Kimmy around the shoulders. “Kimmy! You’re brilliant!!! I can talk to Sam!!!”

“Who’s Sam?” she asked.

A genius, that’s who Sam was. My brilliant friend. He would be able to understand me. As Kimmy’s father got up to look at the television, I took her through the wall and outside.

“You know about the other three people who disappeared?” I asked. She nodded. “Do you think you could find them?”

“I know where they all lived,” she said. “I… I never thought to look for them. Should I?”

“See if they’re in their houses,” I said. “Tell them I’m here to help. Then bring them to the motel. I’ll be in room 13. My friend is there, and I think you just showed me how I can talk to him.”

“By making the tv freak out?” she asked.

“His computer,” I said. “And it’s not making it flicker. It’s the pattern. Short bursts and long bursts.”

Kimmy was just staring at me.

“Morse code,” I said.


	29. Chapter 28: Flashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has figured out how to communicate with Sam, but they still have to figure out what is going on and how to fix it.

Dean hadn’t got back to the motel yet. I found Sam sitting alone, still staring at his computer screen. He was perfectly set up for me to speak to him.

I decided to just go for it straight away. It was going to take me a while to communicate with Sam. I may have known Morse Code by heart, but he probably didn’t. I’d have to keep trying until he recognised that the flickering of his computer wasn’t random. Then I’d have to wait for him to figure out it was Morse Code. Then he’d need to look up how to understand me. Only then would I be able to actually get a message across.

I figured the most common phrase anyone knew was SOS. Three short signals, three long and then another three short. Bothering Sam with that repeatedly seemed like the best bet to help him recognise what was happening.

I went over to stand beside him. It would probably have been easier to actually stand where he was sitting, but there was a mental barrier that stopped me moving through him. It was too weird to be in the same place as someone else, but in different dimensions or planes or whatever it was.

I took a deep, hopeful breath and put my hand through the computer. Three quick, even flashes and the screen flickered, the three short bursts of “S”. Sam blinked. I had definitely gotten his attention. I put my hand in again, holding it three times as long each time. Three long bursts for “O”. Sam’s hand reached for his power cord. I kept going as he jiggled it, giving him the short signals of another “S”.

The danger was that Sam would assume his computer was malfunctioning so badly that he had to turn it off. Maybe I could get around that, though. If I did the same pattern with something else, he’d know it wasn’t the computer. I ran over to the light switch, and Sam looked up and around him as I gave him another “S”. I finished the S.O.S message and went back to the computer again.

I had definitely been smart to use the lights as well, because Sam was no longer looking at his power cord or fiddling with the computer to try and fix it. When I pulsed the message out with his screen again, he stared at it, frowning. I used the computer a third time, and then the lights once more.

Sam stood up, and turned on the tiny television. It was showing some crappy sitcom, but he muted that, and sat on the edge of Dean’s bed, watching the screen. I smiled. It had only taken five tries for him to realise that something was happening and that he needed to pay attention.

I went to the television and did the same thing again. Three dots, three dashes, three dots.

“Huh,” said Sam.

I did the lights again after that, and then Sam pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He held it in his hand, with the screen on and bright. Although it meant moving through Sam’s hand as well, I gave him the message with the phone. With a nod, he put it back in his pocket.

“Okay.”

He had definitely figured out that something was trying to communicate with him. Now I needed him to understand what the message was. I made the TV flash for him again.

“Come on, Sam!” I said. “Your daddy was a Marine. SOS.”

One more time with the light switch and he smiled, looking around the room. “SOS?”

“Yes! Thank God, yes!”

He went over to the computer and sat back down. I followed him, sure he’d know enough to look up Morse Code. He did and as he opened up a guide to the letters, I tapped out the same SOS message for him one more time, just to help him confirm that’s what was happening.

Hoping he was ready, I put my hand in the computer for one brief moment. Just one dot for “E”. He sat for a moment, waiting, but then realised nothing else was coming.

His eyes scanned the screen. “E?”

Thrilled at how quickly he’d understood me, I started on the “L”: A dot, a dash and two more dots.

“L,” said Sam. “E… L… Ellie? ELLIE!?”

There were a lot of flashes for just three letters, but I spelt out “Yes” and he followed along with every letter.

“You’re here? Right now? One long blackout for yes.”

That was much easier than spelling out the whole word for him. I held my hand in the computer for a few seconds and Sam smiled so brightly just looking at him made me smile back.

“You’re alive, right? You’re okay?”

I held my hand in the screen for another long burst and he jumped up.

“Hang on, I’ll call Dean!”

He grabbed his phone out of his pocket again and I felt myself finally breathing out again. It might have take a while, but I had a way of talking to Sam and that meant we could find a way out of this. And it didn’t matter how long it took. Kimmy said I wouldn’t need to eat, so I could stay like this a year. But sooner or later, Sam or my father or someone would find a way to bring me back.

I really hoped it didn’t take a year. We were supposed to be spending this year trying to save Dean, not me.

* * *

While we waited for Dean to come back, I patiently told Sam everything I could. Morse Code is not really useful for constructing full sentences, but with Sam asking the right questions I was able to communicate a few key things. He asked if I knew what had happened to me and I was able to tell him “Witch”. He asked if I knew who the witch as and he was not at all surprised when I told him I thought it was Heather. The fact that she had benevolent magic in her house suggested she at least knew how to cast a spell.

For me to explain what I thought was going on took a lot longer, but Sam patiently waited for each individual letter, spelling everything out loud so I could know he was understanding me. We had got as far as “Think am on other plane like ghost” when Dean came back.

“Where is she? Is she here?” Dean asked, bursting through the door.

“She’s here somewhere,” Sam said gesturing wildly in the space around him. I laughed as his hand went through my stomach.

Dean stared in my direction, though to him it was just blank space. “Uh… Hey Ellie. Glad you’re okay.”

Sam had the hang of reading my code now and it only took him a moment to translate my visual dots and dashes for Dean. “She says hi. She’s making the screen flicker on and off in Morse Code.”

“Smart,” Dean said.

Damn right I was smart. And level headed. If this had happened to Dean, he’d just have gotten agitated. If he hit on Morse Code at all, he would have taken forever to think of it. Plus he wouldn’t have known all the letters by heart already. Sometimes being a massive nerd can pay off.

“So, she says she think Heather’s a witch. Remember, the plumber’s daughter?”

“Right,” Dean said. “So what do we do? Cos I’m cool with just going round there and blowing her freakin’ head off.”

Dean’s hatred for witches was totally justified. Meeting Kimmy had definitely hit home for me that this experience was torture. What would happen if we never got cured? Since we didn’t get hungry or sleeping, did that mean we didn’t age? Would we have to stay like this forever, watching everyone we loved die, and never being able to speak to or touch anyone but each other?

I was pretty tempted to let Dean just kill Heather, but I didn’t think that would solve the problem. What we needed to do was reverse the spell.

What was the quickest way to say it? The fewer words I used, the easier the whole thing would be to explain.

“Spell written on card,” I said, while Sam repeated this out loud to Dean. “In my pocket.”

“A spell,” Dean said. “Okay. So we need to reverse it. Can you spell it out for us?”

I shook my head, although of course, Dean could not see me. “Unknown language,” I spelt out for Sam.

“Then we have to find it,” Sam said. “Dean, open Ellie’s computer up. She’s got all these language databases and stuff bookmarked. Ellie, what if Dean scrolls through the websites, and you make the screen black out if you think you recognise the language?”

I put my hand into his screen to cause the long black out we’d agreed meant yes. That was a good plan. If Dean went through every one of my obscure language sites, I might be able to spot the language and then we could work on transcribing the spell.

It didn’t take Dean long to open up my computer and get online. He often seemed like he wasn’t taking anything seriously, but when the stakes were high, Dean knew what he was doing and he got it done. He ignored all of my other bookmark folders, despite tantalising titles like “Personal Stuff” and went straight to the “Linguistics Stuff” folder.

He looked at a couple of sites and I watched over his shoulder. He didn’t need my instruction at all. He knew what kind of site we needed and he closed up anything that wasn’t it. After a few tries, he got to a page that showed examples of writing in dead languages.

“Maybe one of these? I’ll scroll through slow, okay.”

He was trying to talk directly to me, but he was looking over his shoulder in the wrong direction. It was nice that he was trying, though. I wondered if he remembered saying he didn’t think I should be with them, and realised that I might have heard it.

I didn’t see anything that looked like the language on the piece of card, but I leant forward, through Dean, to hold it up against the screen. Finally, he got to the end.

“Was it there?” asked Sam.

I spelt out no for him and Dean sighed, going back into the bookmarks again. “Okay, what about one of these?” he said, opening up a new site.

About a third of the way down, I saw it. There were the curly symbols and the ones that were almost runic and the strange little mushroom thing. Excited, I put my hand through the screen right away, and as it blinked out, Dean took his hands away.

“You saw it? Which one?”

I started to spell it out for Sam, but he only needed the first three letters. “Glagolitic?” he read off my screen. He clicked on it to get a look at more of the letters. There was a brief description of the Glagolitic alphabet explaining that it was a Slavic writing system, possibly used for translating the Bible, and whole lot of other stuff about its origins and versions. But all we needed was the letters.

There was a table of all the letters and the equivalent letters in the modern Latin alphabet. It also had the pronunciations. It would have taken me minutes to turn the symbols on my piece of card into something I could read out loud or even translate into English. Working through Morse Code with Sam and Dean was an excruciating process.

For each letter, I had to black out Dean’s screen a number of times to indicate which column of the alphabet table to look at and then which row. Sam would copy the symbol down and I’d move onto the next. There were twenty-seven letters altogether.

Once he’d written them all down, he had me explain where the spaces between words were. I’d blank out the screen for the number of letters in each word. Only then was he in a position to actually start translating them.

It was kind of a one man job, so Dean went out to get food. With all the worry about my disappearance, neither of them had eaten.

I watched Sam translating the letters in the spell, and then he used my computer to look for a translation program. I figured it would take him a while to work out what the spell actually said, since it was written in an alphabet more than a thousand years old. Imagine finding something written in Middle English, but with three modern languages that have all derived from that one language. And you’re trying to translate that Middle English directly into Spanish.

Sam was a smart guy, but I was the linguist and it was incredibly frustrating watching him work.

“Oh Sam, no!” I cried, watching him set the translator to Croatian. “That’s a completely different language branch!”

When I realised he was about to try it in Czech, I put my entire arm through the screen. The time it would take me to spell the whole thing out would be worth it if it saved Sam from going through every damn language in Eastern Europe.

He wrote down each letter as I went, before finally looking up after I got to the end of the final word. “Bulgarian and Macedonian? You sure?”

There is no way to communicate a rolling of the eyes via Morse Code. Of course I was sure! I just put my hand through the screen and left it there. If a long black out meant yes, I was going to give him the longest black screen possible to mean the most definite yes.

He smiled. “Okay, I get it! Bulgarian it is.”

Before he could do much more, Kimmy came through the wall. Following behind her was an older man, a little balding and about the same shape as my dad. He was still wearing his blue work uniform, definitely Joe Klinger, the plumber. There was also a tall, dark haired woman with beautiful eyes. That had to be the philanthropist Louisa, and she was wearing a gorgeous black evening dress.

Kimmy pointed to me.

“This is Ellie, the one I told you about!” she said, “Ellie, meet Joe and Louisa.”

Joe extended a hand and took mine in a firm handshake. “Sweetheart, it’s a pleasure. Kimmy says you’re gonna fix this.”

“I’m going to try,” I said, shaking Louisa’s hand as well. “My friend is working on something now. You couldn’t find James?” I asked Kimmy.

She frowned. “The farm is a good twenty minutes out, even by car. I thought I should bring the others here first.”

“No sense us all going,” said Joe. “I can go get him.”

“Well hang on,” I said, holding up a hand. “We might be able to sort this out quicker than that. Let me tell my friend you’re here.”

I went back over to Sam, and communicated in as few words as possible that some of the other missing people were in the room. He turned around in his chair and looked out at them. His eyes scanned over the room, but of course, he couldn’t see Louisa and Joe standing by the door, or Kimmy, hovering near the bed.

“Uh… hi, I guess,” he said. “So... uh… I don’t know what Ellie’s told you, but it definitely looks like we’re dealing with witchcraft. Which is an actual thing.”

“It’s Heather,” said Joe. “She’s been into that witch stuff for months. I thought it was just harmless, putting little protective spells on the house and all that. Didn’t figure the stuff worked, but it wasn’t hurting anyone.”

“I guess that changed,” I said, watching Sam turn back to the computer. “I don’t suppose you know what kind of witchcraft she’s into? Does she have spell books? Have you seen her doing rituals?”

“She does stuff down in the basement. There’s always weird smells.”

“But why would she target you?” I asked.

“Because I confronted her when Kimmy disappeared,” said Joe. “I was starting to think the magic thing was actually working. I went down there and caught her with a photo of her boss at the market. She had cut it up into a bowl and was doing weird stuff with it. She said it was nothing. Next day the guy wakes up blind.”

“Oh my God,” said Kimmy. “That’s what happened to Mr Neumann?”

“I figure it’s coincidence though, right,” said Joe. “Because magic? No way that’s real. But then she has some fight with her friend Jenny. Always fighting, but they always make up. Then Jenny comes down with some mystery illness. She’s still in hospital in Charlotte, I think. It was weird enough that I thought I’d just take a look, you know, while Heather was out. And in one of those magic circle things she has, there’s this doll. Blonde hair, green eyes like Jenny.”

“So you were feeling suspicious?” I asked.

Joe nodded. “Yeah, I mean… you don’t want to believe magic is real and you definitely don’t want to believe your daughter’s hurting people with it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course not.”

“There were other weird things like that. And then Kimmy disappeared at that party. Heather said nothing about it when she came home. You think she’d mention it. A girl disappears into thin air like that and the sheriff gets called and everything. I didn’t find out about it until the next morning when it made the papers. I asked Heather about it, and she laughed. I mean… really laughed. Said how Kimmy had it coming.”

Kimmy looked horrified. I didn’t know her well at all, but she seemed nice enough and everyone in town seemed to love her. It didn’t really matter. No one deserved what had happened to us.

“Anyway, Kimmy never turned up and eventually I figured I just had to ask Heather if she had something to do with it. She denied it. That afternoon, I go into the van, I pick up the little card thing and take a look. And this happened.” Joe put his hand through the door frame to emphasise his point.

Louisa had moved around the room to stand behind Sam and look over his shoulder. She was watching him work, looking between the computer and his notebook, frantically writing things down.

“I think he’s found something,” she said.


	30. Chapter 29: Basement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a showdown a’happenin’!

 

Sam wanted to wait for Dean to get back before he told us what he’d found. We didn’t have to wait long, as Dean returned with pizzas within five minutes.

“Damn, I want some of that,” said Kimmy, watching him open the boxes.

“The pizza or the guy?” asked Louisa.

Kimmy shrugged. “Both?”

Perhaps my situation was making me crazy, but I laughed so hard there were tears in my eyes. It was pretty amusing hearing women talk about Dean the way he usually talked about women.

“Are you okay?” asked Louisa, when I finally stopped giggling.

“I’m good. I just… That was real funny to me.”

“Seriously though,” said Kimmy. “Is he single?”

Dean Winchester was single down to his very soul. It wasn’t just a relationship status, it was at the core of his identity. Single, free, independent, answering to no one. I couldn’t really picture Dean in a relationship. I couldn’t even picturing him going on a date. Unless it was 1955 and he took you to a drive in movie and then you did it in his car.

“Yeah,” I said, though it seemed inadequate to describe just how single he was. “Very.” Then I looked at her. “Wait, didn’t the police report say you had a boyfriend?”

“A girl can’t speculate?”

I smiled. Kimmy seemed like someone I could be friends with. She was nice, funny and pretty smart.

Kimmy, Louisa and Joe all sat on the floor with me while we watched Dean eat. Sam was technically eating, but he only took a bite every couple of minutes, in between looking back at the computer screen or reading over the notes he made.

“Okay, Sammy, just tell us what you got. Ellie, you and your pals listening?”

I jumped up so I could put my arm through the computer screen again.

“Okay, so I’ve translated the spell,” Sam said. He picked up his notepad. “It says something like: _Enemy be gone, to the Other_. I’m guessing the other is whatever plane you guys have been shifted into.”

“Makes sense,” said Dean. “How do we get them back?”

“Well, I’ve found the original spell, I think. And it seems like we just have to uh… kill the witch. Or destroy the source of the witch’s power.”

“Joe?” I asked. “Any idea what that would be?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about this stuff. What would it look like?”

“Sometimes it’s a spell book,” I said. “But it can also be like a talisman or a piece of jewellery. Um...”

If she’d done sort of deal with a demon to gain her power, we might need to kill the demon. But Joe and the others had just come to accept the existence of witches and only in the face of pretty incontrovertible proof. That weren’t ready for demons.

“Or… there might be a more powerful witch giving her the power.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But all her stuff is in the basement. It might be there.”

I relayed that information to Sam, and he passed it on to Dean, who suggested we go straight over there and kill Heather, problem solved.

“Dude, her father is here,” Sam said.

“And she turned him into a ghost, Sam!”

“She’s human. We don’t kill humans.”

Well, that wasn’t strictly true, was it? We did our best not to, but what about the previous case? Sam had shot the two demons and that killed their vessels. They were just innocent people. They might have survived an exorcism, we had no way of knowing.

But the gist of what he said was true. We didn’t generally shoot unpossessed humans in cold blood.

“Joe?” I asked.

He sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t want them to kill Heather, but what if there’s no other way to cure us. If it was just me, I wouldn’t mind so much, but what about the rest of you? And where is she gonna stop?”

I flashed out a message to Sam that we should try every other option before we resorted to murder. Since the boys would be able to drive to the house in a few minutes, I figured those of us who were ghostly had better leave first on foot. Maybe we could scope out the basement before Sam and Dean got there.

It took another couple of minutes to explain that plan to Sam, and agree that when he and Dean arrived, I could use the light switches to communicate. I wouldn’t be able to spell things out anymore, but he told me a few signals I could use. One long blackout for yes and two quick ones for no. A quick then a long if I needed Sam to get his cell phone out so I could give him a more detailed Morse code message. Three quick blackouts for imminent danger.

I reminded him to bring an extra gun for me, in case I needed it once I was cured. After that, I had Joe lead the way back to his house. It was a ten minute walk.

“He said you don’t kill humans,” said Joe.

We were hurrying along the footpath, mostly out of habit. There were few cars on the road and they would be able to drive right through us, of course, but you get used to road safety. Joe and I were in front and Kimmy and Louisa were behind. Unfortunately, they’d both been wearing somewhat binding clothes when the spell affected them, and they were limited by that. They did their best to keep up and we tried not to outstrip them too much.

“Yes,” I said. “We try not to.”

“So… what do you kill?” asked Louisa.

I frowned. “Wow. Um… look… there’s stuff out there. Witches is just the start. There’s all kinds of weird you don’t know. You don’t want to know.”

“Like monsters and stuff?” asked Kimmy.

“Yeah,” I said. “But you don’t need to know. Because that’s what I do. And my friends. We deal with this stuff so other people can go about their lives and not know.”

“But isn’t that hard?” asked Louisa. “Knowing what’s out there and not being able to tell anyone?”

I shrugged. “I was raised on keeping secrets. I’m used to it.”

“So, you were brought up doing this?” asked Kimmy.

“Pretty much. My mamma… something got her when I was three and that’s how my dad got into it. I must have been seven, maybe eight when he told me what was what.”

“Oh. Sorry about your mom,” Kimmy said, but I shrugged. It was what it was and I was over it long ago. “What about your friends?”

“Kinda the same story,” I said.

Almost exactly the same story really. Mother killed by demon, father got into the life. Raised on secrets and paranoia. Learned to lay salt lines before we learned to read. There were differences. My Dad had done everything he could to raise me normal and keep me out of the life. Their father had basically sculpted them into the perfect hunters he wanted them to be. But we’d ended up in the same place regardless.

 

* * *

 

 

Sam and Dean beat us to the Klinger house in the end. The Impala was outside when we got there, and all four of us rushed through the wall, ending up in the kitchen. The boys were there, guns drawn, and had obviously gone the bully approach with Heather.

“You can’t just bust in here!” she was shouting at Dean. “You need some kind of warrant or whatever!”

“Well, we got the permission of the home owner,” Dean told her, opening a door. “These stairs go to the basement?”

He began to head straight down the dark staircase and Heather ran after him. Sam was behind her, keeping his gun trained on her, as she kept trying to grab at Dean to stop him.

“You can’t have permission! My father’s dead!”

Dean turned on the staircase and stared at her. He was wearing his most subtle level of smirk, but you could still see it. “You should read the fine print on your spell books.”

It was a mess on the stairs, seven people in two different dimensional planes, crammed up and trying to rush down to the basement. Dean hit the bottom first, and flipped on the lights.

No wonder Joe had begun to have concerns about Heather’s hobby. Her basement lair was absolutely filled with occult paraphernalia. She had painted symbols everywhere, some of them meaningless, but many of them genuine. There were shelves filled with bowls and dried herbs and weird stuff in jars.

There were no spell books, but loose pieces of paper were scattered all over the two work tables. Most of them were printouts that she must have got from websites. Looking at a few of them closer, I saw they were for spells and rituals.

I had to give her props for being studious. A lot of her printed spells had little handwritten notes on them, corrections about how much of a certain ingredient to use, or little extra pieces like “silver bowl is best”. She was trying to improve on and add to the knowledge about witchcraft. I could identify with that, though I didn’t approve of the kind of magic she was doing.

While Dean was still keeping the gun on Heather, Sam had come as far into the room as I had. He was looking over the papers and the jars of spices. Unlike me, he was actually able to touch them, to look underneath and behind things.

“Ellie, are you here?” asked Dean.

I wasn’t near the light switch, but Kimmy was close and she replied for me, giving Dean the longer blackout burst that meant yes.

“Is Joe with you?”

Kimmy gave another yes, and Heather looked up at the lights. She looked around the room. “What? How are you…”

“That spell doesn’t kill your enemies, Heather,” Sam told him. “What did you think _The Other_ meant? Hell? It just shifts them, makes them invisible, puts them in another plane.”

“And pisses them off,” Louisa said.

Heather marched across the floor, through Kimmy and her father, to Sam. She snatched a bundle of papers out of his hands and put it back on a shelf. Crossing her arms, she looked between Sam and Dean, defiantly.

“That’s ridiculous. Who are you? You’re not even FBI!”

“We’re the guys who want our friend back,” Sam said.

Heather smiled at this. “The nosy bitch? With the huge ass? She’s not coming back.”

Huge ass? Nosy bitch I’d pay. It was my job to be nosy and I can admit to being kind of a bitch. Huge ass, though? It wasn’t exactly small, but “huge” seemed pretty unfair. Outraged, I forgot I couldn’t touch her, and my hand went straight through her face.

“Oh, we can get her back,” Dean said. “If we kill the witch who cursed her.”

He was still armed and so was Sam, and as they moved towards Heather, she backed away. I didn’t like the way she was moving towards her workbench, where all her weird powders and other witchy stuff was. If only there were a way I could come up behind her, stop her getting near the things that made her powerful.

“Look, we don’t want to kill you,” said Sam.

“I kinda do,” Kimmy muttered. Did I mention how much I liked that girl?

“We just need to destroy the source of your power. So just tell us what it is.”

“Or we could just kill her,” said Dean.

Heather was still moving away from them, her hands behind her back, she felt her way along the work table. I was sure she was reaching for something. Maybe if I blacked the lights out, it would take her by surprise? But she was working by feel anyway, and Sam and Dean would be just as disoriented.

It was impossible to get a message to them. But ghosts can shift into our world, right? Ghosts can make that jump, with effort. It was still possible that I could too.

“Heather, please,” Sam said, “We can fix everything, make everyone better if you just…”

She had grabbed a jar full of something red from behind her, and she smashed it at her feet. It had seemed like dust or powder, but as soon as the jar was broken, it turned into a red smoke, rising up and curling around Heather. She began muttering to herself.

I just needed to cross over for a moment. Long enough to push her, hit her, distract her!

The lights went out and down there in the basement that meant total darkness. I heard Dean swear, Joe shout and Heather laugh. Then the lights flicked back on again, but only Heather was prepared for it. Sam and Dean’s guns were no longer pointed in the right direction, and she was able to fling her arms up and push them both backward. Dean collided with the stairs, and Sam hit the back wall.

“Source of my power?” asked Heather. “You can’t destroy the source! I’ve got a demon on my side!”

Sam seemed to be knocked out, but Dean was reaching for his gun again. Heather stepped towards him, and held her hand out. While Dean’s hand rested on top of the gun, I could see it moving. He was struggling to hold it down against her pull.

“He made me a promise. I get the power and he gets my soul one day.”

Still holding the gun down, Dean rolled his eyes. “Oh, you stupid…”

He was one to talk. At least Heather had probably gotten ten years. He had only ten months to go on his ill-advised contract.

Dean had a tight grip on that gun. He wasn’t strong enough to pick it up and aim it, but Heather wasn’t strong enough to pull it out from under his hand. They were at an impasse, with neither able to hurt the other.

Finally, Heather tired of that and instead flung her hand upward again. It pulled Dean up and sideways a little, so that he was now pressed against the stairs again, away from his gun. She was holding him up, his head against the stair railing.

She only needed one hand to hold him like that, and with the other, she lifted the gun up off the floor and into her hands.

“You say that spell doesn’t kill anyone? Great way to hide a body though, right?”

She fired. Fortunately, she was a witch and not a hunter. Even at that short distance, she only hit Dean in the shoulder, but he cried out from the pain of it. And she still had hold of him with nothing to stop her from taking another shot.

I had to do it now. I put my head down and rushed at Heather, willing myself to become solid. I felt myself connect with something, there was a scream from someone, then I rolled forward and heard a gunshot.

When I got my breath back and looked up, Dean was on the ground below the stairs, slumped over, the gun lying near his hand. He was trying to get back to his feet, but as he was looking directly at Louisa, I figured we were back, and I would be able to stop him.

I rushed forward and got down to his level, putting my hand on his good shoulder to gently push him back down.

“Nuh uh, sweetie. You’re not getting up.”

“Sammy,” he said, gesturing vaguely in Sam’s direction.

I was pretty concerned about Sam, but Dean had the bullet wound. It was hard to say which was more important without taking a look at both.

I forced Dean to put his hand on the wound, and waved Kimmy over with my other arm. She hurried and got down on her knees beside me.

“Dean, Kimmy. Kimmy, Dean. Stay with him, talk to him.”

Louisa was already trying to take a look at Sam, but I sent her upstairs to find a towel to stem Dean’s bleeding and then got down to see to Sam for myself. I didn’t want to ask Joe for help. His daughter had just been killed and whatever she might have done, he had to have feelings about that. He was just sitting on the floor, looking at her body.

Sam didn’t appear to be bleeding, but I remembered all the caution surrounding my cracked skull. A lot can go wrong when you hit your head. I knelt so my thighs were nice and flat and kept his head steady by putting it on my lap. Then I was able to shake his arm lightly, to try and wake him without risking further damage.

“Sam? Hey… wake up, Sam… Come on…”

His eyes did open, but he seemed bleary and he didn’t really focus. My face was probably upside down to him, which can’t have helped.

“It’s me, Ellie,” I said. He tried to push himself up, but I grabbed his shoulders and pushed him down again. “Just lie there a minute, okay? You hit your head.”

“Ellie?” he smiled, a cute little dimpled thing that closely resembled his drunken grin. “You’re okay…”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re blurry.”

“No I’m not. You’re just concussed.”

“Oh.”

There was a pause while he kept trying to get his eyes focused on my face. I used the moment to look over at Dean, but Louisa had just arrived with the towel. As soon as Sam was okay to move, I’d need to get Dean back to the motel and stitch up that wound.

And figure out a cover story. There was no way we could tell the local law that Heather had used magic to make her enemies disappear. What about James, the fourth missing person? He was bound to go straight to the sheriff as soon as he realised he’d been cured. What would they make of it all? How would we explain Heather’s death?

I sighed. Cleaning up after is the least fun part of the job.


	31. Chapter 30: Floss and Feelings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has to take care of both Winchesters' injuries. But is anyone taking care of her?

Personally, I always liked to construct an elaborate cover story to satisfy the local law and victim’s families before I considered a job finished. Dean was from a different school of thought, best described as “cut and run”. Still clutching a towel to his shoulder, he had me drive back to the motel, run inside and grab everything we owned, leave a tip for housekeeping and get back on the road.

I kept insisting we needed to pull over and deal with his bullet hole and Sam’s concussion. He kept saying that he was doing fine keeping Sam awake and to put my damn foot down. It was an hour and a half before I was finally allowed to pull over at a crappy roadside motel. By then it was almost morning, and the kid operating the desk was half asleep.

Sam was feeling better, but Dean was worse. He knew how to keep a wound from bleeding too much, but there was only so long he could just ignore that he had a bullet in him. By the time I got him safely inside, it was a good two hours since he’d been shot. Sam was not a lot better, wobbling a little as he came into the room, carrying the first aid kit and whiskey bottle from the car.

He put them on the table and flopped pretty heavily onto the bed beside Dean.

“Sammy? You okay?” asked Dean.

Sam waved a hand. “Fine. Just kinda spinny.”

That was it. Normal, sensible people get treatment immediately when they get a gunshot or head injury. If I hadn’t been there, Dean probably would even have done the driving. John Winchester, ex-marine and, in my opinion, genuine lunatic, had instilled a sense of stoic forbearance in his sons. But there was a point where resilience slid over into sheer reckless stupidity. Well, not on my watch. Those days were over.

“Dean, sit on the other bed,” I ordered.

“You aren’t…”

“NOW!”

Perhaps if he hadn’t been in pain and still bleeding into a towel stained with two hour old blood, Dean might have had the will to argue with me. As it was, he took one look at my face, got himself to his feet with a groan and took the three steps across to the other bed.

That gave me the space Sam would need. It was a double bed, and with all four pillows stacked in the middle, I was able to make a good safe spot for Sam. He was pretty low on energy, but he had enough left to drag himself up with my help. I pushed him back against the pillows, fetched the TV remote and put it in his hand.

“You keep your head back, and don’t fall asleep. If you feel dizzy or it gets worse, you tell me.  You,” I pointed to Dean as I opened the little wardrobe. “Take your shirt off.”

Is there another man in the world who would still try to flirt with you while nursing a bullet wound? Probably not. He grinned. “You are super hot when you’re bossy.”

I rolled my eyes, grabbing two of the little face towels off the shelf. I went into the bathroom to soak them both. Letting the water run for a moment to make sure it was cold. “Sam! I don’t hear the TV. It’ll keep you awake. Dean, if your shirt isn’t off when I get out there…”

I came back out with the two wet towels. I threw one inside the fridge for later and gave the other to Sam, guiding his hand to help him find the back of his head. “Hold that there until I say you can move it.”

Dean had one shirt off, but his t-shirt was giving him more trouble. So much blood had dried on him over time that it was sticking to a huge chunk of his shoulder. Figuring the whole thing was going to be messy, I took his hand and gently guided him into the bathroom. He was somewhat confused by my asking him to sit in the bathtub, but he was too woozy to argue.

The first aid kit had everything it should, and a whole lot of extras most people would find strange. There was the emergency whiskey, of course, which I fetched and handed to Dean. There was also dental floss, a variety of cutting implements and needles. The first time I used dental floss to stitch up my Dad, I was ten. I knew what I was doing.

“Drink,” I told Dean, starting to cut away his shirt.

I was right to put him in the tub. Washing the wound took a lot of effort, and soaked his whole torso. He ended up sitting in a pool of bloody water, but I was even younger than ten when I first started figuring out the tricks to get blood out of fabric. That was an issue for another day.

While I scrubbed my hands with antibacterial wash, I called out to Sam to make sure he was awake. Then I took the whiskey off Dean long enough to pour some over the wound. With one glove on, I reached in. He grunted and then screamed as I dug my fingers in to pull out the bullet. Hopefully the neighbours would think someone was having sex.

“Shit! Dammit!” he hollered, which I think was pretty restrained, under the circumstances.

I held the bullet up to show him, and poured some more water through the wound, followed by more whiskey. My hands had been clean as I could get them, but a motel bathroom is hardly a sterile field. I gave him the bottle back and he took another swig.

He passed out while I was stitching him. I checked his pupils and his breathing, but he was definitely alive. I let him stay out while I finished off the stitches. It only lasted a few minutes and then he was awake again, swigging from the whiskey bottle, and calling me a psycho bitch. If he wanted a sweet, soft handed nurse, he would have to find another girl.

Finally, I finished with him, securing a sterile patch. There’d be a scar marring his left pectoral muscle, which was a crime against humanity, in my opinion. But the bullet hadn’t gone in too deep, and he’d recover. He’d lost a lot of blood and the adrenaline had long since worn off, replaced with just pain. He needed to sleep, so I fetched his bag for a change of clothes.

He absolutely drew the line at me changing his clothes. That was an indignity he would not tolerate. I let him sort himself out in the bathroom, as long as he called out to me every few seconds so I’d know he wasn’t unconscious. Meanwhile, I was checking Sam’s pupils and changing over the wet towel for the colder one. He probably didn’t need it, but I wasn’t taking chances on a head injury.

As I was getting Sam’s shoes off to check he had sensation in his toes, Dean tried to walk himself out of the bathroom. Mistake. He managed to catch himself on the doorframe, and I rushed over to take his weight.

“Just let me help you, idjit!”

He grunted as I got an arm around his waist, and forced him to put one of his around my shoulders. He was still trying to fight me, but he was weak. “I don’t need help, Ellie.”

“For Chrissakes, Dean. You just sat around with a bullet in you for two hours and then survived a bathtub surgery. No one is gonna take your man card if you lean on me for thirty seconds.”

There was a noise from Sam that might have been a laugh, and I glared at him as I guided Dean across the carpet. Definitely too exhausted and weak from blood loss to fight anymore, he even let me pull the covers back and help him into the bed.

He was so easy to tease that I couldn’t resist it. After pulling the blanket back over him, I bent down and kissed him on the cheek.

“Good night, my brave little soldier.”

“I hope the next witch kills you,” he muttered.

If he could still find me irritating, he was going to be fine. He just needed a good night’s sleep. If he slept late and took a few painkillers, he’d be right back to bitching about the sound of my voice and how much space my bag took in the car.

By the time I’d rinsed out the bathtub, put away the first aid stuff and changed into my pyjamas, Dean was already asleep. Sam was still dutifully holding the wet towel to his head, focusing on a black and white movie. He had even thought to turn it down to avoid disturbing his brother. I finished taking his shoes off and found he could feel his toes just fine.

Lights off, and dawn was throwing out enough light for me to see by. I threw the no housekeeping sign on the outside of the door, bolted it and checked Dean’s breathing one more time. Then I stole two of his unused pillows and took the remote from Sam. I turned off the TV and finally slid onto the bed beside him.

“Show me your pupils,” I said, and he turned to look at me, slower than I would have liked.

His eyes still looked a little unfocused. He knew how many fingers I was holding up, but it took him longer to answer than it should.

“Okay, I want you to stay awake a little longer,” I told him.

He nodded. “You’re the boss. Apparently.”

“Someone has to take care of you two.”

“Dean’s going to be unbearable tomorrow, trying to claw back some dignity.”

I snorted. “His masculinity cannot be that fragile.”

Sam only smiled in response and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Dean grunted, like he knew he was being talked about, and rolled over in his sleep.

“Can I ask you something?” asked Sam.

I nodded.

“Remember the Seven Deadly Sins? When we had Envy tied up?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What did he mean? When he said you were his kind of girl?”

I stared at Sam. Surely he didn’t remember that! It had been two months ago. I barely remembered it. But now he had mentioned it, everything was coming back to me. With Envy tied up, he’d gloated that we were all sinful. He said Dean was all lust and gluttony, and Dean hadn’t bothered to argue. What was it he’d said about me?

_Oh, you’re my kind of girl. Always comparing yourself to someone. He’s stronger, he’s smarter, she’s prettier. You got a deep pool of envy inside you._

“I… just what he said, I guess. That I compare myself to other people a lot.”

“Doesn’t everybody, though?” he asked. “He said you had a deep pool of envy inside you.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about that. Not even to Sam. I didn’t even think about it in the privacy of my own head.

“He was just being mean. Trying to provoke us.”

Sam frowned. “Well, Dean… lust and gluttony. That I get. And Tamara, she was pretty wrathful. But envy is your sin? I just don’t see it.”

Of course he didn’t. Dean didn’t try to hide his gluttony and he certainly didn’t hide his lust. His appetite for diner food and pretty girls was out there where anyone could see it. Tamara had been pushed to the point of letting her anger go. But my feelings were hidden deep down. I didn’t tell people how I was judging myself every second of every day. Sam would get bored pretty quick if I told him every time I felt jealous or inadequate.

“What do you think my sin is, then?” I asked.

The thing I love about Sam is that he will actually think about a question like that. He could have just flattered me and told me I was sin free. He could have laughed it off and reminded me of how lustful I could be. But he didn’t do either of those things. He really thought about it.

“Wrath, probably,” he said. “Or maybe gluttony. Lust even, if Dean’s walking around with a towel on.” That did make me smile, and he smiled too, looking down at me from his pile of pillows. “But definitely wrath.”

I was happy for Sam to think that. I was pretty good at losing my temper. He’d heard the huge bust up my father and I had. I could certainly be vicious and though I rarely held a grudge, when I did, I was brutal.

“Well, you know me better than he did,” I said.

This was not an answer that satisfied Sam at all. “But he was the actual personification of Envy. So, what would make him say that?”

I sighed. Sam probably didn’t mean to push me. He knew me well enough to know that I’d say no if I didn’t feel like talking about something. But I’d just spent all afternoon working a case, before hours stuck as some sort of living ghost and then two hours driving before performing surgery on Dean with dental floss and whiskey. I still had hours to go, staying awake to keep Sam up while his concussion wore off. I didn’t have the energy to fend off his probing questions.

“Everywhere I look, I see people have what I don’t,” I said. “When I was little, my babysitter Jody used to take me to the park. She’d push me on the swings and stuff, but all the other kids were there with their mommys. I never got why I didn’t have that.” I looked up at Sam, hoping he’d have some reply, so I could stop, but he was just watching me talk. “The other kids had nicer houses and better toys. You know what that’s like.”

He nodded. If anyone knew how it felt to be an outsider at school, it was a Winchester. At least I stayed in one place for my whole schooling.

“And you know, later on, it was even pettier. I always wanted to be like the girls who could afford the nice clothes, and they were so pretty and I was… well, you remember what I was. I wanted to be as smart as you. Or as cool as Dean. Or tough as my Dad. Or tall as my friend Tonya, or have a boyfriend as cute as Hayley’s. Or be as pretty as my Mom. My whole life, I’ve never been happy with what I am. Because there’s always someone nearby who’s so much better.”

Towards the end of my rant, my voice had gotten louder and squeakier. Just hearing myself made me cringe.

“See…” I whispered, looking over at Dean. He was still sleeping soundly. “It’s not like it matters what Dean thinks. I haven’t been in love with him for years. But every time he cringes at my voice, I get jealous of every girl I ever met who can talk without sounding like a monkey.”

Sam sighed and lifted his arm up and over my head. He put it around my shoulders and pulled me into him. “You don’t sound anything like a monkey. Dean’s an ass. And maybe you’re not the smartest or the toughest or the coolest or the prettiest. But you’re still extremely smart and very tough, and really cool and super pretty. You don’t need to be the best at anything, because you’re so great at everything.”

At that last part he squeezed me closer and I let my head flop down into his shoulder. I knew he was just exaggerating to make me feel better, but it did help. He might exaggerate, but Sam didn’t lie. He wouldn’t have said I was any of those things if he didn’t think it was at least a little bit true. And whatever his brother may have thought of me, he liked me. Sam Winchester was definitely smarter, tougher, cooler and, let’s be honest, prettier than me. But he could hang around with anyone he wanted, and he still preferred me and always had. That was worth something.

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Besides,” he said. “You forgot something. And you are the best at that.”

“Dental floss surgery?” I asked.

He smiled. “You’re kind. Who was there for me when I was a kid and no one wanted to listen? And I never once tried to contact you in all those years after, Ellie. I should have and I didn’t. But you took me right back like I’d never been gone. Because you’re kind. Where would your father be without you, huh? Don’t tell me you came back after college because you wanted to hunt. I know you better than that. If you wanted to hunt, that’s what you’d have been doing for years. You wanted to take care of Bobby. Taking care of people is what you do. It’s why you hunt. It’s why you’re good with dental floss. It’s why you’re sitting with me now when you’re exhausted. Even when you were bullying Dean, you were doing it because you care about him. He calls you a howler monkey and makes you feel like crap, but you still care about him.”

I could feel myself starting to cry, and I had to burrow my face further into his arm so he wouldn’t see. I couldn’t see him either, but I could feel it as his head bowed down and he kissed the top of my head.

“No one in the world cares about people as much as you do, Ellie. No one.”


	32. Chapter 31: 2 Months

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snapshots of Ellie's adventures as she road trips to new and exciting places with the Winchesters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An extra long chapter, but it covers an extra long time period.

_A dingy motel in Gainesville, Florida…_

I cut through each stitch slowly, careful not to tear at the healing wound. I had cornered Dean before he could shower, figuring it was better to get the stitches out so he could wash the wound straight away and I could put a new dressing on after. He was sitting on the bed and I was straddling a chair in front of him. Leaning forward against the chair back kept me steady.

Wielding the tweezers in my right hand, I used my left to keep him still as I pulled at the first stitch. It came out pretty easy, but the second was a little stuck. He grimaced, but took it without making a sound. The wound was healing well and I’d been changing the dressing daily, whether he thought I needed to or not. I had made the rules clear: I was in charge of medical decisions and he would suck it up and do as he was told. He complained every single time, but never actually refused.

There were four stitches, which meant eight loose ends to pull out. There were a few sucked in breaths and a moan or two, but he mostly handled the whole process without showing any pain. He was like an animal, the instinct in him was never to show weakness.

I dropped the last one into the bowl and ran my hand over the wound. There was a little residual blood, but the two sides had already started to bond together.

“Okay, just be careful with it. It might bleed a little, but that’ll flush it out.”

“Thanks,” he said, for the first time. He lifted his own hand to feel it, as he looked down.

I gasped. “Was that an actual thankyou? Are you possessed? Sick?”

He smiled, getting to his feet. The way his muscles moved under the smooth skin of his torso… Damn, Ellie, be cool! He offered me his hand and pulled me up and out of the chair.

“You’re better at this than Sam,” he said. “Gentler.”

“My hands are smaller,” I said, letting go of his hand quickly, and turning my head so I didn’t have to see him looking at me.

I could still feel it though. I could feel his eyes even with my back turned.

* * *

 

_An abandoned cannery in Lafayette, Louisiana…_

I was impressed to see they hadn’t tried tying the boys together. These vampires had some sense. Dean was seated against a vertical beam. I assumed he was tied to it. At least he was somewhat comfortable. Sam was hanging by his hands from the roof.

Lying flat on the walkway above, I counted. Two guarding the door. One standing near Dean. Three lounging casually on the rundown machinery. I’d seen two outside while I was coming across the roof. They were bound to come in once I started a ruckus. Then there was the pair who seemed to be leading the nest. He was very eighties, still stuck in the leather and grunge look. She was more modern, dressed to impress, with an impractical miniskirt and thigh high boots. What I wouldn’t have given to have her thighs!

There I was, at it again. Focus on the job, Ellie. I was looking at ten vampires, maybe more. I had come in with two machetes, so if I could get one of the boys loose, they could take one and we’d be looking at five each. Less if the other could find a weapon of his own.

“I like the big one,” said Miniskirt.

Eighties smiled, fangs out. “Happy Anniversary, baby.”

Eww. Okay, so they’d only used rope to tie Sam to the ceiling, which meant Dean was probably not chained either. I could easily slice through with one of my machetes, and bring them into play. They’d been armed when I lost them, so it was possible their own weapons were lying around the cannery somewhere.

Miniskirt was sniffing Sam. So gross. His hands were fixed above his head and his feet were tied together, without touching the ground. All he could do was turn his head away from her, but she grabbed his face with both hands.

“Oh, I’m gonna end you bastards,” said Dean.

If I could sneak across to the next walkway, I could reach down and cut the rope attached to Sam’s hands. He wouldn’t be able to get up right away with his feet tied, but it would be a distraction. How would I get down, though?

Sam cried out in pain as Miniskirt got her fangs into his neck. No time to plan! Dean was frantically trying to squirm out of his bonds, which amused Eighties.

He got down on his haunches and looked into Dean’s face. “Not your turn,” he said.

Dean’s shouted threats were enough cover for me to sneak the ten metres along the walkway and across to the next. I allowed myself a quick glance downward. Miniskirt had stopped biting Sam, and had moved around to his other side. She was trying to savour him, the freak.

Good for me, though. I checked my machetes were secure on my belt and grabbed onto the rope holding Sam. As his attacker got her teeth into the other side of his neck, I let my legs drop away, and I started sliding down the rope. I tried not to cry out from the rope burn, but it made no difference.

One of the lounging fangs spotted me and pointed up, but too late. I cut the rope right below me, and Sam dropped. Miniskirt was taken by surprise, and went down with him. I was able to swing myself far enough to drop down without landing on them. Sam’s hands were now free and he held Miniskirt down long enough for me to swiftly kick Eighties in the chest, grab a machete and cut the bitch’s head off.

I handed Sam the other machete so he could cut his ankle bindings and get to work. Dean had managed to use the distraction to work his way up the beam and onto his feet. In two steps I was close enough to slice through the rope at his wrists.

“How did you boys even stay alive without me?”

* * *

 

_A campsite in central Arkansas…_

I splashed the cool, clean water onto my face, grimacing at the chill. We could have gone to a motel, with hot running water and a roof, but since we were in a state where there was a recent warrant on the infamous Winchester Brothers, we were better off avoiding towns unless we had absolutely no choice.

We’d had to cut and run again, after being caught by a security guard as we packed up our shovels and salt. A good six hour drive later, and we were far enough out to take a chance on stopping. Dawn had arrived and an empty riverside campsite was good enough for us. There was water and that was all I cared about. The vengeful spirit had been particularly vengeful, and he didn’t like that we tried to salt and burn him. He’d taken it out on me.

“Why are you being so careful?” Sam said, watching me as he leant against the Impala. “You’re bloody and dirty. Might as well be soaking, too.”

“Laugh it up,” I said. “Next time, I’m burning the corpse and you can distract the dead mass murderer.”

He did laugh. “Deal, next dead mass murderer we need to dig up, I’ll be decoy. But seriously, get in the water. You’ve gotta wash those cuts.”

Dean had been away in the forest, going about his business, but he returned. He came down to the river and stood on the bank.

“Still whining, Princess?” I glared at him. “Hey, if you’ve never had a ghost drag you halfway across a cemetery, you’re not doing the job right.”

“By my hair!” I reminded him.

He sucked in breath as he caught a look at my back, my shirt torn as I’d been dragged over sticks and dirt. I couldn’t even feel the individual cuts and scratches. My back was just one mass of pain.

“Ouch. It looks even worse in the daylight.”

“It can’t look as bad is it feels,” I said.

He chuckled at me as he bent down to wash his hands in the river. No doubt if I’d really been hurt, he wouldn’t have found it funny at all. But I was in pain and I wasn’t a fan of the new nickname he’d picked out for me. I missed Pipsqueak.

“Aw, Princess! If you can’t handle it I can always take you back to the palace.”

He was bent over. He was six inches from me. I had to wash off anyway and he was being a dick. I grabbed his arm and tugged. He toppled over and hit the water with a splash. After one irritated shout, he reached up to push me and I slipped on the muddy bottom, falling backwards and landing on my ass.

I leapt on him, grabbing him into a choke hold. He flailed for a moment to try and get me off, but he stopped. He knew I was trained to use his weight against him, so he stayed still for a moment, calculating.

Sam was doubled over with laughter.

“I’m gonna drown him, Sam!”

With just a flick of his foot he had knocked me down and back into the water. “Bring it, Princess!”

* * *

 

_A dark alley in Amarillo, Texas…_

I let him slide his hand up and under my skirt, trying to avoid thinking about what he was. His tongue was in my mouth, and it wouldn’t have been helpful to vomit at that moment. He pushed me against the wall and I made the most satisfied sounding noise I could manage. I was supposed to get it outside and distract it and this was pretty distracting, but God, it was gross!

His left hand was pulling at the strap of my tank top and his right hand was creeping up further… further…  _Any time, boys_ , I thought.  _I’ve just got a Shapeshifter trying to get into my underwear. No rush._

I finally heard the sound of the bar’s back door open and Winchesters or not, I was not letting it get any further. I shoved him back with both hands, reaching into my boot as he stumbled. I had my fingers on the silver knife, but I didn’t need to bother. I had pushed him straight into Sam, who had immediately grabbed him and held him steady while Dean plunged his own knife straight into the heart.

Sam stepped over the falling body and took my hand, gently pulling me away from the wall.

“Are you okay?”

“That was gross,” I said. “There’s taking one for the team and then there’s having Shapeshifter tongue in your mouth.”

Dean was casually wiping down the knife. “I’d have done it, but I wasn’t his type.”

Sam had taken his jacket off. “You’re cold, Ellie. Here.”

It was probably the thought of his gross, sheddable hands up my skirt making me shiver, but it was kind of chilly, and the whole experience made me want to cover my body from head to toe. I put the jacket on and pulled it tight around me. It was Sam-sized, so it came down below my skirt. I might have been naked underneath for all anyone would know.

“We should go,” Dean said, looking furtively around.

“God yes. I need a shower.”

Skirting around the body, I followed Sam towards the entrance of the alley. Dean hurried to catch up, reaching us just as Sam gave the all clear for us to move out into the empty street.

“Gotta say, Princess,” Dean said, “Ganking it was one thing, but letting  _that_ ,” he pointed back towards the alley, “get to second base. That took guts.”

* * *

 

_A motel room in Denver, Colorado…_

I popped the top off the bottle and handed it to Sam, who took it with a “thanks”, while still staring at his computer screen. I opened my own beer and pulled a chair up beside him.

“Oh, Sam,” I said, seeing what he was looking at. “I’ve read that one cover to cover.”

“I just thought maybe there’d be something…” he said, turning to me. He had the deep wrinkles of worry on his forehead, and his eyes looked like he was in physical pain.

I shook my head. “But Dad thinks he might have a lead on a book about crossroads deals. It’s with a collector in Spain, but he’s willing to sell.”

Sam tried to smile, but it wasn’t a real one. You can tell when he’s faking, because his dimples don’t show.

“Hey,” I said, putting my beer down and standing back up. “Why don’t we go out? Just for a walk or something, get some fresh air?”

He shook his head, turning back to the computer. “It’s okay…”

Dean had been gone all day and we had been at our computers since the moment he left the room. When my father called, I’d taken twenty minutes to go talk to him in the parking lot, and I’d come back to find Sam still reading.

It wasn’t fair. Dean was off enjoying his last year, and Sam was left behind, desperately searching for a way to save him. The wrinkles in his forehead kept getting deeper and his eyes kept getting sadder.

I looked up at the clock. Ten past six. I grabbed his hand off the keyboard and gave it a little tug. “Come on, let’s go get dinner. Just you and me. If Dean comes back he can get his own food.”

He turned away from his screen to look at my face, but he still didn’t get up.

“We can go somewhere a bit classy. Italian or something. I’ll pay!”

The corners of his mouth turned up just slightly, and I knew he was going to give in. I pulled his hand again. “Saaaam…”

He rolled his eyes, but got to his feet. He pretended like I was pulling him up, but there was absolutely no way I could physically manage that unless he was helping.

“Attaboy! Dean’s not the only one who can have fun. We’re gonna have a friend date!”

“Friend date?” he asked, his dimples starting to appear.

“You know… Like a date except there’s no sex at the end.”

He laughed, and there they were, those deep little lines on each side of his mouth. I had to smile just looking at them, resisting the urge to kiss them. That’d be weird, right?

“Well,” I said, turning my head a little to hide the rising blush in my cheeks. “It’s time we did things that you want to do. So where are we going?”

We went for a walk. We talked about Dean and how scared Sam was that we might not find a way to save him. We ate Italian. We talked about Stanford and Jess and how he would have married her if she’d let him. I was sure she would have. We sat in the park. We talked about Dean again, and how he refused to tell either of us how he really felt about his impending damnation. We watched a little boy chase the ducks. We argued about Austen and Dickens and the Brontes. We walked back to the motel. We talked about his dad, then mine. We watched a movie on the tiny motel TV.

There  _was_  sex at the end, but only in my pathetic, trashy dreams.

* * *

 

_A badly lit park in Las Vegas, Nevada…_

I tried to aim my gun but it was hard to get off a good shot while they were rolling around like that. Where the hell had Sam got to?

“Ellie, shoot the friggin’ thing!”

Dean was pinned under the werewolf, trying to hold her head back so she couldn’t bite him. I was not at a good angle to shoot her. I was a good shot, but there was a pretty high chance of my hitting Dean if they moved even an inch.

“Dammit Ellie!”

I aimed for the fleshiest part and fired. I heard Dean cry out in pain and feared I’d hit him, or worse, the werewolf had managed to bite. But he hauled the beast away from him, and I took the opportunity to get three more shots in.

Running over to them, I leapt over the still corpse of our quarry and reached down to help Dean get up.

“Did it bite you?”

He gave me a casual shrug and a grin. “Nah.”

As I pulled him up, I noticed his torn shirt and the gash on his arm, spilling blood out onto the grass.

“Ouch! We gotta patch that up!”

He waved a hand, and then winced, clapping it over his wounded arm. “Yeah… probably. Where’s Sammy?”

“He was right behind me,” I said, putting my gun back in my waistband.

I took off the thick plaid I was wearing over my tank top and grabbed Dean’s torn arm before he could object. It wasn’t a great tourniquet, but it would do until we could find Sam and get back to the car.

“Close one, right?” asked Dean, as I tightened my shirt around his arm. Leaning in close, I got a whiff of his aftershave and gagged.

“Maybe she wasn’t even trying to bite you. Probably got one whiff of that aftershave and figured you’d taste like crap.”

I finished the knot and started walking back the way we’d come, pulling out my cell phone as I moved.

Maybe it was my excellent hearing, but I knew Dean was pulling an outraged face behind me. “What are you talking about? Chicks love this stuff.”

“Oh honey… they really don’t!” I called back to him, as I dialled Sam.

* * *

 

_A crowded bar in Santa Barbara, California…_

I spotted Sam through the mess of drunken dancers, sitting alone at the bar. Pushing my way through the throng with repeated mutterings of “excuse me” and “sorry”, I managed to make it back to him.

“I’m back!” I declared, grabbing the stool next to him and signalling the bartender. He nodded that he’d seen me, but there were at least four others waiting.

“Have fun?” Sam asked.

I shrugged. “Mediocre. Where’s Dean?”

“Went home with someone.” I nodded, unsurprised. Our nights out had a pretty standard routine to them. There was a pause while he took another sip of his beer. “You could do that, you know?”

I stared at him.

“Go home with someone,” he elaborated. “I mean, toilet stalls and parked cars isn’t very… intimate.”

My laughter was so loud that the bartender and three other people turned to look at me.

“Intimate?” I said, pulling a face to show him exactly what I thought of that concept. “Going back to some guy’s shitty apartment and listening to him talk about his job and his cat and whatever else? No thanks.”

Sam smiled. “If you’re really unlucky, he might even make you breakfast.”

I shuddered. If I wanted a relationship, I’d go ahead and look for one. I’d stay in Sioux Falls and let my friend Jody set me up with one of those “nice young men” she was always talking about. I’d get a nine to five job and a picket fence.

“Can I get you something, darlin’?” The bartender had finally reached me.

“Tequila, thankyou. Sam, I got one basic rule. Guys are dumb. You’re easily confused. So I draw nice clean lines in the sand. Meaningless sex on one side, everything else on the other. I stay for breakfast and suddenly they’re wanting my phone number and to buy me dinner.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” he asked, as the bartender put my shot down in front of me and waited for me to pay.

I slapped the money down on the bar. “Nope. I’ve been sex and dinner too many times. Next guy who buys me dinner better be proposing.”

Sam laughed and lifted his beer, clinking it against my shot glass. He watched me down my shot, and I saw the little concern wrinkles materialise on his forehead.

“You know… we can talk about what happened with Ash sometime,” he said. “If you want to.”

Figures he would see through my words and get right to the bottom of my heart. He was wily, that Sam Winchester, and he knew me. I tilted my head towards the blonde at the other end of the bar. She had been looking right past me at Sam, and I knew that look on her face. It was the “is that his girlfriend?” look.

“She looks like she makes a good breakfast,” I said. “You should go and talk to her.”

Sam sighed. “Ellie…”

“I want a motel room to myself. Come on, stud, you got this!”

* * *

 

_A cave in Boise National Forest, Idaho…_

I gripped tightly onto my knife with one hand and ran the other along the rocky wall, to stop myself if I tripped. There was light coming in through the little gaps in the cave roof, like tiny skylights. But it fell in patchy beams and it was still hard to see every jutting rock or crevasse I might stumble over.

Sam’s back was ahead of me and I could hear Dean breathing behind me as we crept through the rock formations. I would have been quieter on my own, and even Dean admitted that. But it wasn’t worth the risk. Just one touch from this thing and I’d be under, without backup.

The thin path opened up into a much wider cavern. There were people slumped against the rocks and two lying on the ground. Dean stepped in behind me and we all looked around the cavern. There were two other exits, presumably leading further into the caves.

There was no sign of the djinn anywhere. Just the bodies of his seven victims, in various states of decomposition, littering the cavern. I shifted my grip on the knife as I began to make my way towards one of the narrow clefts in the rock.

“You two go that way,” Dean said, pointing. “I’ll take this way.”

“I don’t think we should split up,” Sam said. “Why don’t we wait for it to come back?”

“Shh!” I hissed. I’d heard something.

They had learned to trust my hearing, and both shut their mouths, listening out for what I’d heard. Then it happened again, a low groan. I glanced around at the bodies until I spotted him. He might have been early twenties, but probably younger. He was face first on the ground, his arm stretched out to his side. He was so pale, it was no wonder we’d thought he was dead.

I rushed over to him, and got on my knees beside him. He wasn’t a very big kid, and he was skinny enough that I could lift him up to get a good look at his face.

“Hey… it’s okay…” I promised him.

His eyes were glassy and he looked right through me, stuck in whatever joyful dream world the djinn had created for him. He didn’t even know he was lying in a cave, his blood drained out slowly whenever his captor needed to feed.

“Ellie!!!”

I turned around quick enough to throw my knife at the djinn. The blade hit his arm and cut him, before bouncing off and clattering to the ground. It was enough to distract him while Sam and Dean leapt on him. He was dead before I could even get on my feet.

Something brushed against my hand, and I turned back. The boy was drooping forward, forward… I caught him before he fell, and reached out for his white face. His eyes were closing.

“No! No, we’ll get you to a hospital, sweetie. It’ll be okay!”

It was not okay and neither was I. That night, Dean bought me enough tequila shots to down an elephant. But in the morning, all I had was a headache, patchy memories, gross red sobbing eyes and Sam to hold my hair out of the toilet bowl. No amount of tequila could fix the world enough for us to save everyone.


	33. Chapter 32: Just Ain't Sam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean thinks Sam came back from death wrong somehow. Ellie just thinks people behave strangely when they’re hurting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place just before, during and just after the first post-teaser scene of Episode 3x05.

After nearly three months together, we had all sorts of little routines.

There was the bar routine: Dean drove on the way there, and gave the keys to Sam or I, depending on whose turn it was to be designated driver. Sometimes it was walking distance from the motel, in which case, party time for everyone! We’d sit together for a while, taking turns to pay. Dean would disappear with some gorgeous woman who made me hate myself. I’d find a hick with low standards and disappear too. I would come back. Dean would not. Sam and I would go back to the motel.

There was the research routine: Sam would get out his computer. I would get mine. We’d set them up side by side. Dean would do a few searches on his phone and then declare that since I was around he was no longer needed for research. He’d guilt Sam into agreeing he deserved time to enjoy himself while we looked into the local weirdness. I’d tell him to sit his ass back down. Dean would decide to make himself useful by bringing us food and beer, or fetching whatever else we needed. We’d figure out what we were dealing with and head out to kill it.

There was the roadside diner routine: Dean would order the most offensively artery-clogging item on the menu. Sam would order the healthiest. My heart would tell me to order like Dean and my head would tell me to order like Sam. I’d go somewhere in the middle, depending on little factors like how skinny the waitress was or how far I’d run the previous night. Dean would flirt with the skinny waitress. I’d steal his fries. He’d allow it. We’d leave.

There was the night time routine: We would eat crappy take-out while either working on the case, checking the local news for weird, or watching a movie. I’d take a shower. Sam and Dean would get a bed each, I’d take the floor or sofa. I’d say “Good night Sam”, Sam would say “Good night Ellie”. Dean would roll his eyes. I would say “And screw you, Dean”. Dean would say “Screw you too, Princess”. Lights out.

Then there was the morning routine. Sam woke at some ungodly hour. He’d wake me up with coffee at a more sane time. Sam would try and get to the shower before Dean, but sometimes he failed. Either way, they’d both stopped worrying about whether I was in the room and would walk around in a towel, or just their jeans or whatever. I said nothing about it, because a girl’s gotta have a healthy fantasy life. Breakfast on the go and then back to work, or back on the highway.

 

* * *

 

 

It was a morning in late October. Dean had seven months left, but he was more worried about Sam. Despite my constant reassurances, he was still concerned that Sam had come back from death not quite right.

“He’s just mad,” I said. “He’s mad at you, mad at the world. But he’s still Sam.”

“He’s not mad at me,” Dean said, tying the laces on his boots.

I cradled my coffee, still with one ear open so I could hear the shower. Sam was in there, but he was generally pretty quick. “Not to your face,” I said. “But he’s pissed, Dean. You’ve got seven months left and you won’t let him help you.”

“If he tries to help me, he dies. It’s that simple.”

“I know that. But come on… like you’ve never been angry about something you can’t change.”

He shrugged. “Fair enough. But you’re sure he’s okay?”

“He’s definitely not okay,” I said, as the pipes squeaked and the shower stopped running. “But he’s regular Sam. I promise.”

“Alright,” said Dean, though there wasn’t much certainty in his voice. “I believe you. I’m gonna get more coffee. You want anything?”

I told him no and he headed out. There was a café a short walk from the motel and he’d probably only be gone ten minutes, but it would be long enough for Sam to get himself ready and for me to send an email.

I opened up my computer and read back over what Jo had sent me. She was still hunting, and doing a damn good job, too. Only now she and Aunt Ellen worked together, which was fantastic. I was happy they were getting along again, plus I knew they made a great team. I would not want to be the demon that met either one of them, let alone both together. Jo had written to tell me a great story about her mother and a vampire nest, and I had read it aloud to an impressed Sam and disbelieving Dean the night before. Now it was time to reply.

I was only a paragraph in when the shower stopped and Sam came out of the bathroom. I glanced over as I typed. He was doing it again! Unlike Dean, who rather enjoyed parading around in a towel, Sam usually emerged with at least some kind of pants on. It wasn’t that helpful, because the bottom half was not my problem, but his newly showered, wet, glistening, naked torso. All the same, Sam had a degree of modesty, and an obvious concern about what might happen if his towel ever fell down, so generally there were pants.

As I looked up from my email, I saw that an exception had been made. He wasn’t wearing a towel, but worse, was clad in nothing but boxer shorts. I swear to God, this is the absolute truth. There was maybe four steps and two yards of fabric between me and his naked body. If I was forced to choose, I’d probably say I had a preference for Dean, but Sam had some serious goods. He smiled at me, a little blush rising in his cheeks, and those dimples appeared on his nervous face. He was only a year younger than me, but when he blushed like that, his dimples showing, he looked nineteen. Thank God he wasn’t, or what was going through my head would have been even more inappropriate. The only way I could avoid moaning audibly at the sight of his abs was to frantically type about it with caps lock on. Jo was going to get an email full of my dirty thoughts.

I managed to restrict my lust to the email, even while he was bent over to dig through his bag for clothes. That was way too much for me to handle, and I had to look out the window for a minute. Finally, he threw a shirt on, before grabbing some jeans and heading back into the bathroom. When he came out again, I was still having something of an abs, butt and dimple related crisis.

“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot to take any pants in. I know it makes you feel awkward.”

“It’s fine,” I said, turning my computer slightly to make absolutely sure he couldn’t read what I had written to Jo.

“Where’s Dean?” he asked.

“Getting more coffee,” I said. “Long drive.” Of course, Dean could have easily let Sam or I drive, but he only did that if he was totally incapacitated. He’d rather drive nine hours on his own then let one of us behind the wheel.

Sam nodded. “You still looking at the case?”

“Just sending an email to Jo,” I told him.

The last time Sam had seen Jo, he had been possessed by Meg. He’d had to watch as Meg tied her up and terrorised her, before Dean came to help. After getting rid of Dean, she’d come after me. Absolutely none of that was Sam’s fault, but of course, he still felt terrible about it.

“Tell her I said hi, I guess,” he said. “If that’s okay. I mean, she might not want…”

“I’m sure she’ll send a hello back,” I said.

He smiled a little. “Tell Ellen hi too, then. Are you packed up?”

I was. Apart from the computer, my stuff was already in the car. I finished off the last few lines to Jo, imagining how much she would laugh at my desperate fantasy life when she read it. Then I shut down the computer and sat down on Sam’s bed to watch while he finished packing up.

“So, I was thinking,” he said. “About Dean…”

The brothers rarely talked to each other about anything serious or real. Dean was worried Sam might have come back from death somehow different, and he came to me. Sam was still upset that Dean was headed for Hell, and he came to me too. I had been so right to stick with them. Who would either of them have had, if not for me?

“You have an idea?”

“Well, Ruby and your Dad fixed the Colt…”

I frowned. Speaking of not talking about things, I was guilty of it myself. Who the hell was this Ruby? Why did she help my father fix that gun? Why was she trying to befriend Sam? What sort of demon was on our side? There was something shady about her whole thing, and I didn’t like it. But I was afraid to raise the issue with Sam. He and Dean had fought about it, and I just didn’t feel like I could say anything Dean hadn’t already. And I wanted him to feel like he could tell me about her, so I would have a better handle on what she said to him and what she might be up to.

“Yeah?” I asked, hiding my irritation.

“Well, why don’t we summon a crossroads demon?” Sam asked. “Threaten them with it, make them give us back Dean’s contract.”

I was clearly frowning now. That seemed like a plan fraught with problems. The demon Dean had made his deal with said that Sam would die if he tried to get out of it. Maybe we could try a sneaky solution, but just going in with a gun and making threats didn’t seem like a good idea.

“I don’t know, Sam. That seems kind of risky.”

“To who? To me? Even if she gets mad and takes me out like she said, you and Dean will still have the Colt. You can kill her, get out of the contract that way.”

I stared at him. He couldn’t be serious! It seemed like he didn’t actually care if he died, just so long as there was a chance of keeping his brother out of Hell. But supposing it didn’t work? If the crossroads demon killed Sam, and then Dean went to Hell anyway. He’d spent eternity in torment, and all for nothing. That didn’t help anybody. I understood that Sam was upset that Dean had traded his soul for Sam’s life, but now he _was_ alive, it didn’t make sense to throw that away on a chance.

“But you’ll be dead,” I reminded him. “And Dean won’t want that.”

“I’m gonna suggest it,” he said.

I sighed. “He’ll say no, Sam.”

 

* * *

 

 

“No!”

“I don’t understand, Dean! Why not?”

“Because I said so!”

It was nine hours later, and we had just crossed the border into New York. Sam had spent all day working himself up to telling Dean about his threatening to kill the crossroads demon plan. Just as I’d warned him, it had not gone down well.

I was stuck in the back seat, listening to them shout over one another. I picked up the newspaper and put it across my face, hoping I could groan quietly into it so they couldn’t hear me over their yelling.

 _For crying out loud, boys!_ I thought. _It’s all very sweet that you’re willing to die for each other, but you can’t just keep swapping in and out. Sooner or later, one of you has gotta die and stay dead._

“Ellie!” Dean yelled. “Ellie! Tell him!”

Dean rarely asked for my opinion. On something that was my wheelhouse, like languages, or computers, sure. He knew when someone had more knowledge than him. He asked my opinion when it came to his concerns about Sam. But in a personal argument between the two of them? Dean wanting me to weigh in? That could only happen because he believed I would take his side.

He was right.

“Sam… maybe we should think about another…”

“HE HAS SEVEN MONTHS, ELLIE! WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR…”

“WHOA!” Dean shouted over him. “Don’t yell at her like that!”

“I…” Sam started.

“She’s just looking out for you,” Dean went on.

“She should have been looking out for you!” Sam protested.

I threw down the paper, my mouth open in shock. He could _not_ be suggesting that Dean’s fate was somehow _my_ fault! I hadn’t even been there. I’d spent five months helping Sam find a way to get Dean out of the deal. Every moment I could spare, I worked with him on it. Didn’t that effort mean anything to him?

I was all ready to tell him to fuck off when Dean lost it. He pulled over the car and turned in his seat.

“Hey, you’re pissed! I get it. You don’t have to like it, but I couldn’t let you die. I still can’t. But I chose this, okay? You be pissed at me if you want, but don’t you dare take it out on Ellie.”

What the hell kind of bizarro world had I entered? I had taken a nap in the back seat earlier. Was I dreaming? Had I woken up in some parallel dimension? Sam was accusing me of shit I didn’t do and Dean was sticking up for me? The whole damn world was upside down and backwards.

“It’s okay, Dean,” I said. I didn’t need him to tell Sam off like he was still a little kid. I could stick up for myself, and I knew how to tell Sam he was being an asshole.

“It is not okay,” Dean said. “Sam, apologise to her.”

He really was treating Sam like a kid, and I was about to protest when I realised what was really going on. Dean was still worried that something was wrong with Sam, that he wasn’t himself somehow. He wasn’t angry at Sam for yelling at me. He was scared by it.

There was a pause and a sigh, before Sam turned around in his seat. There was some light from the almost full moon, and some from the headlights shining in front of us. More than enough to see the genuine regret in Sam’s puppy eyes.

“Ellie, I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve done nothing but help me. It’s not your fault. I know that.”

I should have been pissed. I should have told him to watch his mouth in future. I should have accepted his apology but made it clear I’d been hurt by what he said.

Instead of that, I melted when faced with the force of his sad eyes. That was the thing about them, they weren’t intended to manipulate. He couldn’t turn them on and off just to get the reaction he wanted out of me. He looked that sad because he really was that sad, and he really did feel that bad for shouting at me. And he should have felt bad, because he was wrong. But I just couldn’t be angry at him when he looked at me like that.

“It’s okay,” I said, faintly.

Dean looked back at me, still frowning, but I knew it wasn’t a frown meant for me. He was just angry and concerned. He pulled back onto the highway, though, satisfied that the conversation was over and that Sam wasn’t going to continue down a reckless road to try and save him.

“Ellie, tell me about the psychotic killer,” he said.

I picked the newspaper up. Sam had bought it in Nashville in the morning, and I’d spotted the story. It was about two murders overnight in a town in New York, but it had been brutal enough to make the papers in other states. Just a few lines, but enough to get my attention.

“It says he ripped his victims apart with ‘brute like ferocity’,” I read. Sam had already seen it, and our combined word was enough to convince Dean we had a possible werewolf worth hunting. This was the first time he’d actually heard the details.

“Okay… so any mention of his razor sharp teeth or his four inch claws? Animals eyes?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But full moon on Friday, so the timing makes sense.”

“That’ll be the last time it changes for a month,” Sam said. “We gotta find it before then.”

“Two days,” said Dean. “No sweat.”

 

* * *

 

 

Once we hit town and checked into the motel, it was late but still too early to sleep. We’d eaten on the road, but Dean said he was hungry and going to head out to look for a burger. I told him to get me some fries, and went out with him to grab my computer from the car before he left.

“It really is just because he’s upset, Dean,” I said.

He leant against the car, waiting for me to duck into the back and pick up the computer. I grabbed Sam’s too, figuring I might as well bring it in to him. When I stood back up, Dean was frowning at me.

“Yelling at me, that I get. But at you? That just ain’t Sam.”

“It is,” I told him. “He’s looking for anyone to blame. That’s totally normal behaviour for someone in as much pain as he is.”

Dean sighed. “Well, I can’t fix it, Ellie. I won’t let him die. I won’t do it.”

It was me that sighed then. “You don’t fix it by letting him die. You fix it by talking to him.”

He wouldn’t. Dean just didn’t roll that way. Arguments, yes. Talking about monsters, no problem. Maybe even being honest with me, if he was desperate enough. But to sit down with his brother and let Sam talk about his feelings? Not likely.

I waved at him as he rolled out of the lot, before I went back into the room. I put both the computers down on the table, and sat on a bed to take my boots off. Sam was in the bathroom, but I heard the toilet flush and he soon came back out.

He just watched me while I put my boots in the corner next to my bag. I figured I should probably get in the shower quick, so I could be done by the time Dean came back with my fries. Then I’d have a little time to wait for my hair to dry before I went to bed. My pyjamas were at the top of my bag and I fished them out.  

“Ellie?”

“Yup?” I asked, rummaging for clean underwear.

“Can I… Uh…”

I fished out what I needed and bundled everything up to take it to the bathroom. On the way, I stopped in front of Sam, figuring he was going to apologise again, and would rather do it to my face.

I was right. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Just… I didn’t apologise because Dean told me to. Please believe me. I should never have yelled at you, and I definitely shouldn’t have said any of this was your fault, because it’s not.”

“I know you didn’t mean it,” I said. “It’s okay.”

He shook his head. “No it isn’t. I’m sorry.”

“Alright, then I accept your apology,” I said. “And I know time’s running out, but we’ll find him a way out of this. I’ll help you. I promise.”

I got up onto my toes to give him a kiss on the cheek, then dropped back down again.

“I don’t think I deserved that,” he said.

I smiled at him. “Everybody deserves love, Sam.” 

 

* * *

 

 

Note: Ellie's email to Jo (and the reply) can be seen on [my tumblr](http://winchestersplusone.tumblr.com/post/117571927638/special-ficlet-going-to-hell).

 


	34. Chapter 33: You Wanna Play?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they begin work on the latest case, Ellie starts a war with Dean that she may not be able to win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I… Um… Look, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what happened. There was just time to fill in between scenes from the show and so… shit went down. Poor Sam. He doesn’t need this.

There had been one survivor of the probable werewolf attack. Both his brothers had been killed, but Kyle Brooker had survived. Poor guy was lying alone in a hospital bed, pretty banged up and very shaken. He’d lost both his brothers in one vicious attack, it must have been so traumatising.

We all went to see him, the boys dressed up in their suits, me casually professional with jeans and a button-up shirt. I had my sketch pad with me. The nurse showed us in, and Kyle looked up as we entered.

“Good morning, Mr. Brooker,” said Dean, “We’re with the County Sheriff’s Department. I’m Detective Plant, this is Detective Page and our associate, Miss Singer.”

“Yeah, uh… I’ve been expecting you,” Kyle said.

Dean was obviously trying not to look too surprised. “You have?”

“All morning,” he said. “You _are_ the sketch artists, right?”

Dean looked at me, smiling smugly. I smiled back. I could absolutely pull the act off and I’d be very happy to prove it.

“Absolutely,” Dean said. “That’s what Ellie here does. But listen, before we get started on that, I wanted to ask you. How’d you get away?”

I could see in Kyle’s face that he preferred not to think about it. “I… I have no idea. I was hiding and he found me. He was coming right for me and then he just… stopped. Staring at me with this blank look. And after that he just took off running.”

A middle aged doctor entered the room as Kyle was explaining this. He introduced himself as Dr. Garrison. He had just come in to check in with his patient, but Sam and Dean took the opportunity to take him outside and ask some questions. They instructed me, the department’s official sketch artist, to talk to Kyle and get a sketch of his attacker.

It had been dark and Kyle hadn’t seen the guy that clearly, but he told me what he did know and I did my best to piece together a picture from that. I was used to having a model to sketch, so just using someone’s words to draw an accurate physical picture was tricky. I did it by staring at Kyle and basing my sketch on him, but altering the details according to what he told me. He was kind of blurry about the face, so I had to draw a full body sketch.

His attacker had been about six foot, dark hair and eyes that may or may not have been blue. He did have a tattoo of Wile. E. Coyote on his arm, which I figured ought to make him pretty recognisable. Kyle was pretty confused by some of my questions. He didn’t get why I was asking about the length of the guy’s teeth “They were just teeth!” or whether there was anything animal about his eyes “No… they were just kinda crazy.”

What I did manage to learn was that my sketch work was satisfactory, and that the guy who’d attacked Kyle and his brothers had normal teeth and finger nails. His eyes were regular eyes and he moved like a regular man. On the whole, Kyle was describing a normal, though murderous human being. It didn’t sound werewolf to me.

Outside, Dean was examining my sketch as we returned to the car, looking at it like he was some sort of art critic.

“What’s going on with his crotch?” he asked.

“I didn’t have anything to base it on,” I said. “I was kinda working from memory.”

Sam looked over his shoulder. “The face is great. And all the proportions are right.”

“Thankyou, Sam.”

“Dean’s right about the crotch though.”

I snatched the pad away from Dean, irritated, until I looked at it properly. I had drawn his legs meeting his waist, but I’d done it in a hurry, not really paying attention to it. Kyle had described the guy as kinda skinny, so I’d tried to draw his hip bones somewhat pronounced. Instead, I’d kind of melded the waist with the legs, with an enormous bulge around about where the groin should have been. Once I saw it, I cracked up laughing. They weren’t being mean at all. It genuinely looked ridiculous.

“Oh my God!” I giggled.

“If that’s your memory of a dude’s groin, you’ve got a great sex life,” Dean said.

I closed up the pad, still laughing a little. Kyle hadn’t seemed to notice it when I’d shown it to him. Unless he genuinely had been attacked by a man with a bulge that size in his pants.

“So, what did the Doctor say?” I asked.

“Both brothers DOA at the scene,” Dean said. “He gave us the lowdown on the coroner’s report.”

“Hearts missing?” I asked.

“No,” Sam said. “But get this… Lungs, kidneys and intestines were.”

“Eww!” I said. Missing hearts I was used to. But total disembowelment, with other internal organs ripped out too? That was a new one. There must have been little left.

“Yeah,” said Dean. “Not werewolf behaviour.”

“What’s that violent?” I asked. “Demon? They’ve been known to eviscerate people for fun.”

“That would explain why the attacker looked totally human,” Sam agreed.

“Why would a demon stop halfway through an attack?” Dean asked.

I looked at Sam. He looked at me.

“Because… um…” I began.

“I think… he could… Yeah, I got nothing.”

We had reached the car again. As I slipped into the back seat, I was still thinking about it. Not a werewolf. Not a demon. Neither of those things would kill two people and leave the third alone, just walking away.

“It’s odd,” I said, as the boys got in. “Kyle’s brothers were ripped to pieces, which suggests something out of control…”

“But then it just stopped and left Kyle alone,” Sam said. “And that’s… kinda the opposite.”

“Exactly. What does that?”

They didn’t have any more idea than I did.

 

* * *

 

 

Back at the motel, we were all back in our casual gear. There were no more witnesses, no more information available. We knew everything there was to know. All we could do was look for monsters that tore all their victim’s organs out, but also, for some reason, might spare someone.

Sam and I had managed to cram our computers onto the tiny table, while Dean sat on his bed with a stack of local newspapers he’d charmed out of the girl on the desk. They covered most of the preceding week and he figured he might as well look through them for anything else weird. Meanwhile, I was looking through the books I’d scanned from Dad’s library, while Sam went online.

“I don’t know, guys, maybe this really is just a normal human psycho,” I said. It definitely wasn’t anything in _Cretyrs Moste Vile_ , and that was the life’s work of a medieval monk who’d chronicled every monster ever heard of in Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa too.

“Do you ever think about what it would be like to have a life where the phrase _normal human psycho_ doesn’t come up regularly?” asked Sam.

“Probably dangerous,” I said. “Who’d want to be ignorant, with what’s out there?”

“Statistically, I think Hunting is actually more dangerous,” Sam said, but I just shrugged.

“Well,” Dean closed another newspaper and threw it onto the carpet. “This is the most boring town in America. But hey, at least the church bake sale was a success.”

He stood up and wandered over to the window. “Anyone else hungry?” he asked, peeking through the curtains. It was getting dark out.

I sighed. “I’m not sure this is even our type of thing. Let’s go out, get some food, have a few beers and give it a fresh look in the morning.”

Even Sam agreed that there was no point carrying on when we weren’t getting anywhere. He closed up his computer and promised to be quick in the bathroom so I could get changed. Dean got on his phone to look for a place to spend the evening, and I took the time to check my email. Just a short one from Jo, in response to my descriptive and lustful email about Sam and Dean the day before.

I cracked up laughing as I read it. I’d complained about Dean deliberately walking around half naked because he enjoyed how awkward it made me. Her solution was that I should punish him. She suggested I fight fire with fire.

Dean looked up at the sound of my laugh. “What?”

“It’s just an email from Jo,” I said.

He pocketed his phone as he got up. “Oh, how’s she doing?”

“Fine,” I said. He was coming up behind me, about to look at my screen. I slammed it closed so fast I might have broken the keyboard.

He grinned. “What’d she send you?”

“Nothing!” I said, standing up to put my body between him and the computer.

He tried reaching around me to grab it. “Oh, so you won’t mind if I read it?”

I slapped his hand away. “It’s personal!”

He chuckled. “What? Are you girls writing each other about hot you both are for me?”

“No!” I squealed, feeling the blood rushing into my face.

“Oh, you are, aren’t you? Sammy! Hey Sam, I told you so!”

Sam came out of the bathroom, running a hand through his hair. “You told me what?”

“Ellie’s so into me.”

“No I am not!” I insisted, still able to feel the heat radiating off my cheeks. My whole face felt on fire.

Sam only smiled and suggested Dean should hurry up and get ready to head out. He positively strutted into the bathroom, looking very pleased with himself. I busied myself with opening the computer back up so I could shut it down properly.

“He was trying to read my emails,” I whined.

“I’ve been there,” Sam said. “Don’t worry about him. You know how bears are more afraid of you than you are of them, right?”

I stared at him, not seeing the connection. I wasn’t afraid of Dean. I just didn’t want him reading the things I’d written about him and his brother in a moment of weakness. I was embarrassed, not scared.

Sam smiled at me again. “He keeps insisting you’ve got a crush on him and I have one on you, Ellie. Kinda seems like he’s trying to take attention off something.”

That’s when I remembered what Sam had said a couple of months earlier, when Dean had teased me about my childhood fixation with him. _The tables have turned_ he’d told me. Now it made sense, I was afraid of Dean reading what I thought about him, but he was more afraid of me. There was relief in knowing that, but what was I supposed to do with that information?

Jo had said I ought to punish Dean, but that wasn’t really something I knew how to do. I’d definitely caught him checking me out in that red skirt. Should I wear it? But then what? Just walk around in it? How do you deliberately look sexy?

Dean came out all ready to go, and I asked where we would be going. There was a place across the street and just a few doors down. We always liked a place where no one would have to drive, so we agreed to go there. I sent them both off ahead of me, figuring I needed some time to get ready. Dean was still laughing at me, asking if I was going to email Jo back. I let him go with a scowl. There was a power imbalance in the team, and it needed to be addressed. He was going to pay, whatever it took.

 

* * *

 

 

I managed to cut my preparation time down to a bit over half an hour. The red miniskirt was a definite and I tried four or five options for a shirt, before settling on a black tank, with a denim jacket to go over it. Then I had to choose from my very limited selection of bras. I ended up with the ugliest one I owned, but my shirt wasn’t coming off, so no one would ever know. This was supposed to be the equivalent of Dean walking around in a towel to deliberately frustrate me. I would under no circumstances be sleeping with him.

Then there was makeup. The effort it would take to deal with my hair simply wasn’t worth it, so I left it out. I slipped a knife into my boot, because you never know, grabbed my bag and headed out. The motel was in the centre of town, and the streets weren’t crowded, but they were far from empty. The bar was easy enough to find. It wasn’t exactly a classy establishment, but it wasn’t a dive either.

As soon as I came in, I spotted the boys sitting on opposite sides of a booth. They both had beers and burgers in front of them, though only Dean had fries. He was pouring out some ketchup as I crossed the bar floor, threw my bag down, and with a total disregard for Rule Five, sat next to Dean.  Before even saying hello, I reached over to grab one of his fries.

“Uh… yeah, sure, help yourself,” he said.

An evil thought came into my head and I had to bite my lip to avoid giggling. “Sorry, couldn’t help it,” I said, turning to look directly at him. “I’m hungry.” I lowered my tone a little and leant in as though I was telling him a secret, though I didn’t whisper. “I have appetites, Dean. I have needs.”

“Okay,” he said, slowly, dropping one syllable into the air and then the other. “You, uh… you want me to go order you something?”

“Yeah, I’d love a burger,” I said, getting up again so he could get out of the booth. “And a beer.”

He stood up and edged his way past me. I didn’t move, so he had to brush against me to get out. As he walked over to the bar, I sat back down, leaning against the wall and running my legs along the whole length of the seat.

Sam stared after his brother and then looked at me. “Nice outfit,” he said, and I could see him trying to hide a smile.

“Just felt like dressing up a bit,” I said. “Are the burgers good?”

“Fine,” he said.

I took another of Dean’s fries while I watched Sam eat, and it wasn’t long before Dean was back again. He looked at my legs, taking up the entire seat, then at my face, one eyebrow raised.

“Sorry,” I said, making room for him and sitting up properly. He was focused on the bare skin between my boots and my skirt as I shifted my legs out of his way. I pretended not to notice this, thinking of my old friend Tonya. _Be cool_ , she always said. _Don’t look like you’re trying._

There was that other valuable piece of advice, too. Draw attention to the mouth, Tonya said. I’d done it before and it had worked, so it might work again.

“Thanks,” I said, as he passed me the beer.

I just took a sip from it, as I normally would, while facing Sam. I didn’t even bother to look at Dean. Either he was watching me or he wasn’t.

“So… what did I miss?” I asked. “You guys just talking about the case, or what?”

My burger came just as the guys were finishing theirs off. Dean still had fries to eat, but Sam sat back, looking at people as they came into the bar. It was a little dead, but it was only a Thursday night. The burgers were pretty good, actually, despite Sam’s less than enthusiastic review. Looking at other people seated at their table, or up at the bar, pretty much everyone seemed to want a burger. Maybe they didn’t serve anything else, or maybe it was a local speciality or something.

We talked about the case a little, agreeing that we may just have had an ordinary human monster, but it wasn’t worth giving up yet. We talked about calling my Dad for help, a prospect I was opposed to but that Sam and Dean thought was reasonable. We weren’t asking him to physically come and save me, his weak, pathetic daughter. We just needed him to look at some books. I grudgingly agreed to call him in the morning if we hadn’t had any ideas by then.

As I finished off the last of my fries, I tried to mop up the ketchup the best I could, but it made kind of a mess. I remembered Tonya, and went with it, turning slightly so I was facing Dean. Then I put one ketchup-covered finger in my mouth and slowly sucked the sauce off. I did the same with the next finger and the next, putting each finger all the way into my mouth and pulling it out again as slowly as I could, my lips round and my eyes half closed.

“You okay Dean?” asked Sam.

“Huh? What?”

I looked directly at him, holding my hands away from me, as there was still a little sauce on them.

“Hey, Dean, can you grab me a napkin, hun?”

“Yeah,” he said, getting up immediately.

“Maybe another beer, too, yeah?”

“Okay,” he said.

As his brother started moving towards the bar, Sam was shaking. Finally, with Dean well out of earshot, he looked at me. “Oh my God,” he said.

“What?” I asked, still trying to avoid touching anything with my sticky hands.

“You are so bad,” he said, finally letting out the smile that had been hiding.

“Don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said, smiling back.

He just shook his head at me, laughing behind his hand as Dean came back, with a pile of napkins and three beers. He pushed Sam’s beer across the table at him, and took an enormous gulp of his own, while I wiped my hands properly. Then he handed my beer to me. Actually passed it direct from his hand to mine! I made sure my fingers stroked the back of his hand as I took it from him.

We weren’t out late, and it was one of those nights where we all went home together. Dean was sitting on his bed as I got ready to get into my pyjamas. I committed one final act of deliberate temptation by using the space beside his head to put each foot up while I unzipped my boots. I just carried right on talking to Sam about a book I thought Dad might have, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dean was staring. There was no way, in a skirt that short, he didn’t get a flash of my underwear.

I asked Dean to flatten out my bed roll while I was in the shower, just to see if he’d do it for me. He did, and there was even a blanket and pillow ready when I got out. Apparently that miniskirt turned Dean into helpful and obedient putty. I had an awesome new super power. But to use it for good or for evil, that was the question…

“Goodnight Sam.”

“Goodnight Ellie.”

“And screw you, Dean.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Princess?”

Though his tone suggested something extremely ominous, I just laughed at him, because he wouldn’t have sounded so irritated if I hadn’t succeeding in giving him a taste of his own medicine. And if he retaliated, well… that’d mean walking around in a towel again, and those were consequences I could live with.

 

* * *

 

 

Sam woke me in the morning with coffee as usual, crouching down to my level. I forced the hair back out of my eyes as I took the cup from him. He leant forward to pass it to me, whispering in my ear.

“You have it coming, but I’m innocent. I’m a victim, here.”

I must have looked confused, as he shook his head at me, before getting back to his feet. I took the first sip of my coffee and tried to adjust to my surroundings. What was that grunting noise?

I saw it as I looked around the room. Dean was in between the two beds, with not a stitch of clothing on except for his boxers. He was doing push ups, every muscle in his legs, arms and torso straining against his flesh and hitting me square in the eyes. I swallowed hard at the sight of his bulging bicep, feeling the red arrive in my cheeks all at once, without even the slow creep that usually happened.

He finished the set and grinned at me, as I took a sip of coffee to cover up my face. “Morning, Princess.”

Oh… Oh! Okay!!! That’s how it is? You wanna do this? You wanna play, Winchester? FINE! You got it, asshole! I’ll play!!! 


	35. Chapter 34: Hansel and Gretel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I needed to write something upbeat, after 10x21, and this is what I came up with. It’s mostly based on the actual scenes from 3x05, with some additions. Also, Ellie has exactly ZERO time for Dean’s homophobia.

I kept putting off calling my father until finally, after breakfast, I had run out of reasons not to. Dean was reading the newspaper, with the police scanner sitting next to him. Sam was at the table, back on his computer. I picked up my phone and was all ready to head outside when he called out.

“Wait. Dean, turn it up.”

There had been another violent attack. According to the chatter over the scanner, there were two bodies, and a survivor was being taken to hospital. I put my phone back down and sat on Sam’s bed to keep listening.

We listened to all the back and forth, trying to get a sense of what had happened. A woman had called police and ambulance to a small house in the woods, saying an old woman had murdered her boyfriend. Police had arrived to find the old woman dead, apparently from a blow to the head, which they were guessing was self-defence. The other body was a young male, and pieces had been carved off the body.

“Carved up?” Dean mouthed at me, and I pulled the appropriate “that’s gross but also pretty weird” face.

As the communication over the scanner started to die down, Sam went into the bathroom to change into his suit, while Dean decided to just strip down to his underwear right in front of me. Looking him directly in the eye, I pulled off my t-shirt and took my time, folding it back up neatly. He busied himself changing his pants, while in just my bra and jeans, I crossed the room to my bag. I’d need to change into a button-up, to look more professional.

By the time I’d fished a new shirt out, Dean was nearly dressed. I sat on his bed, while I put my shirt on, and he pointedly ignored me, focusing on tying his shoes.

As I was getting together my sketchpad and pencil, I felt someone behind me. At first I thought it was Sam, but it was Dean. I felt his breath on my neck as he whispered in my ear. “Seriously, Princess? Is that all you got?”

I took a quick step backwards and turned quickly. “Oh, that was just a warm-up. I play the long game, sweetheart.”

Sam had opened the bathroom door, and he must have heard me, as he raised an eyebrow in our direction. “Don’t even want to know,” he said. “Come on, they should have got her to the hospital by now.”

“There’s something freaky going on in this place. Psychos taking out organs and now killer old ladies,” said Dean, as though he and I hadn’t just been threatening each other with… _what_ exactly?

“I don’t like it,” I agreed. “Ripping guys to shreds, okay. Standard monster. But old ladies carving off slices of hiker? That’s just wrong.”

* * *

 

We had to wait for the real detectives to leave the survivor’s room before we snuck in. Doctor Garrison was there again, trying to calm her down, and on his way out he asked us what the hell was happening. If only we knew.

I hung back, though there was no reason for them to bring a sketch artist in. It didn’t matter, since she didn’t ask who I was anyway.

“We’ll try to be brief,” Sam promised her. “Miss Watson, can you tell us how you got away?”

“I didn’t eat as much as Ken did,” she said. “So, I wasn’t as out of it.” It seemed liked she’d drugged them, then? That hadn’t been mentioned on the police scanner, but it made sense. “And when the old woman was…” she went on but then paused as she struggled to find the words, “carving up Ken, I shoved her, and she fell. Cracked her head on the stove. She’s dead, right? I… I killed her?”

Dean nodded. “D’you have any idea why she’d do this to you?”

“No!” Miss Watson said. “One minute she was a sweet old lady and the next she was, like, a monster.”

It did sound kind of like a demon possession, but the boys didn’t ask about her eyes. Seems like if her attacker’s eyes had gone black, that’s probably something she’d have mentioned anyway.

“Can you remember anything else?” Sam asked.

“Um yeah,” said Miss Watson, still trying to hold back her tears. “Did you find a little girl there, by any chance?”

“A little girl?” I asked, surprised.

Dean flashed me an annoyed look and I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be a detective. Whoever she thought I was, Miss Watson looked over at me and nodded. “I thought I saw her outside the window. She… just disappeared. Just vanished into thin air.”

We all looked at one another. There was a ghost there? Ghost possession was a thing, but I’d never personally encountered it. Dad might have, though he’d never mentioned it. We’d have to go to the house and check for EMF, which meant getting by the sheriff’s people somehow.

“It must’ve been the drugs?” she said. It was really more of a question, and it sounded like she wanted us to tell her yes.

“This disappearing girl?” asked Dean, “What, uh, what’d she look like?”

“Does it matter?”

I couldn’t see his face, but I was willing to bet Sam had turned on his dimpled smile. It confused even me, and I was used to it. It just made you want to do what he asked.

“She had this dark, dark hair and really pale skin,” she said, with a sigh. “She was around eight. She was a beautiful child. It was… odd to see her in the middle of something so horrible.”

I could have offered to draw the child, given my cover story, but why bother, except to prove I could? It was probably a ghost. The ghost of a child, possessing old ladies into trying to eat people? And tall tattooed men into ripping organs out of his victims? Well, I’d seen some weird stuff. I was open minded.

We left the poor woman. There wasn’t much more she could tell us and she’d been through a lot. I made sure to tell her I was sorry for her loss before hurrying after the boys and back through the hospital to the car.

* * *

 

We went straight to the house and had to wait a little while the forensics team finished up. We sat in the car and watched them inside the house and outside, all dressed in their hygienic blue coveralls.

“Like little blue sperm,” Dean remarked and Sam gave one sudden snort of laughter.

“We should get you some,” I told Dean. “Apparently you don’t have enough clothes.”

“Aw, Princess, if I was covered head to toe like that, what would you email Jo about?”

“Don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

Dean laughed. “Ha! Admit it, sweetheart. You need something good to look at every day.”

I was tempted to remind him that his brother was just as fine as he was, but given Sam was sitting right next to him, I thought better of it. Dean had made it clear that he agreed to whatever it was we had going on. I’d declared war on Dean, there was no need to risk making Sam uncomfortable.

“I’m sure I could cope,” I muttered.

After the forensics team had disappeared in their van, we drove closer to the house. Although both the boys knew how to pick a lock, generally it was easier for me, since I had the smallest, nimblest hands. An ordinary front door like the old lady’s was a piece of cake.

As we came in, ducking under the police tape, Dean sniffed.

“What’s that smell? Blood?”

“Carving a guy up probably stinks the place up,” I said, looking around at the huge blood stain, with other splatters nearby. “It might be covering up the smell of sulphur though.”

“Good point,” Dean said. “Doesn’t sound like a demon anyway, but we better look while Sammy checks for EMF.”

Dean did a physical examination in the main living area while I scoped out the bedroom and bathroom. It was a tiny cottage and the fact that it was in the woods made me think of a fairy tale. The old lady didn’t have anything out of the ordinary and there was no sulphur so I went back to the others.

“No sulphur?” Dean asked.

“Nope. You?”

“Nothing. What about EMF?” he asked Sam.

“It’s going nuts,” he said, holding up the EMF reader. “Over by the window. There was definitely a spirit here.”

Dean went over to the window and looked. As he opened the shutters and leaned out, Sam sidled up to me.

“I’m going to say something, and you just say I’m crazy, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“So… fairy tales,” he said. I stared at him. “Guy and girl walking in the woods. Little old lady in a cottage tries to eat them…”

I was still staring, but my mouth was open now. I wanted to tell him he was crazy like I was supposed to, but he had a solid point. “Kyle and his brothers… Builders… Two of them savagely eaten and the third one safe. Oh my God, Sam!”

“I told you to say I’m crazy!”

“Oh my God, though!”

“What?” asked Dean.

“Hansel and Gretel,” I said.

“Hanna-what-l?”

“Hansel and Gretel,” Sam said. “It’s the fairy tale. You know the one about the two kids and they’re in the woods and an old lady tries to eat them?”

“Until Gretel pushes her into the over,” I added, remembering that the old lady in our case had hit her head _on the oven_ after Miss Watson pushed her.

“Then we got the three brothers, arguing over how to build houses, attacked by a big bad wolf,” Sam said.

“Three Little Pigs,” Dean said, catching on quick. “Actually, they were a little chubby. But, uh, don’t those things end with everybody living happily ever after?”

“Sure, in Disney,” I told him. “But the originals were brutal. Sex, violence...”

“Cannibalism,” Sam went on. It was the folklore of the day,” Sam said. “Moral lessons…”

“With violent consequences,” I agreed.

Dean looked from one of us to the other. “Does one of you want to finish your own sentence, or are you one person now?”

It was obviously meant to insult or embarrass, and Sam looked downward as a slight pinkness appeared in his cheeks. I just smiled politely at Dean, like he’d complimented me. I could definitely benefit from being more like Sam, so why be offended? He was smarter and kinder and just generally a better person than me. If we became one person, I’d be the dead weight.

“So, what are these murders, some kind of re-enactment?” Dean asked. “That’s a little crazy.”

“What even is crazy?” I asked. “We deal with stuff as weird as that every day.”

Dean found this difficult to deny. “So, how’s the creepy ghost girl involved?”

“Um… Well, she must have been here for a reason. I’m willing to bet you top dollar she was at the construction site too,” Sam said.

I could already see the frustration in Dean’s face. “We gotta do research now, don’t we?”

Sam shrugged, but I gave Dean an enthusiastic pat on the back. “You bet! We’re going to the library, Dean!”

“Ugh,” he moaned, closing his eyes, but I grabbed his hand and started to pull him towards the door, deliberately oozing enthusiasm and joy.

“The library, Dean! The library!”

 

* * *

 

We dropped Sam at the motel to look into what kind of spirit had the power to control people into committing fairy tale crime. I told him to ring my Dad, but he wasn’t keen on explaining the whole concept. I imagined my father’s face as Sam explained about Hansel and Gretel to him, and I had to laugh. Maybe he was better off looking into it alone.

Dean and I went to the local library. Even I had trouble maintaining my joyful nerd act for six hours. I did my best, though, and made sure we were super thorough. Every time Dean decided that we’d done our best and there were definitely no candidates to be our little dark haired ghost girl, I’d present him with a new source of records. He’d say something like “Well, crap Ellie, the microfilms only go back to the 40s” and I’d say “It’s okay, Dean! Look, they have physical copies going back much further!” He’d say “There’s definitely nothing in the papers, Ellie. Let’s call Sam.” I’d say “Check it out! I found old police records!!!”

I was teasing him with my cheerful demeanour, but I was serious about doing the job right. It didn’t make sense that we couldn’t find anybody that sounded like the little girl described to us. It was late afternoon when Sam finally rang and said he was going to walk from the motel to meet us. We had almost finished the police reports, so we looked at photos in the last few missing person’s reports, but none of them were dark-haired, pale girls of the right age. There were dark haired girls with dark skin, and pale girls with blonde hair. The dark haired, pale kids were boys. Or they were fifteen or three, but not aged anywhere close to eight. There were little girls, both missing and dead, of about the right age, but none of them looked right.

Finally, we emerged back out onto the street, to find Sam waiting for us.

“So?” he asked.

Dean sighed. “Checked every record they had. Found the usual amount of violent childhood deaths for a town this size,” he said, as he led the way across the road and towards the park. We’d left the car parked a street away, the closest place that had been available at the time.

“Okay,” Sam said, obviously expecting more.

“Wanna know how many were little girls with black hair and pale skin?”

“Zero?” asked Sam.

“Zero!” Dean agreed. “But that’s okay, cos Princess Card Catalogue here found the missing persons reports! How many little girls with black hair and pale skin have gone missing, Sam?”

I could see Sam was amused, he smiled at me before turning back to his brother. “None?”

“Zip! Zilch! Nada!” Dean said. He stopped walking so he could turn and face Sam, and adequately express his frustration. “Tell me you’ve got something good, cos I just spent six hours squinting at microfilm and listening to Little Miss Sunshine explain how the Dewey Decimal system was invented.”

Sam wasn’t even trying to conceal his smile. “Okay, so you ever hear of Lillian Bailey? She was a British medium from the 1930s.”

“She got a thing for fairy tales?” Dean asked.

“Nah, trances,” said Sam. We started walking again, me in between the two of them and feeling like a midget, as always. “See, she’d go into these unconscious states where, um, get this, her thoughts and actions were completely controlled by spirits.”

“A ghost puppet master?” asked Dean.

Sam nodded at the adequate enough description. “Yeah.”

“Okay, so maybe that’s what our ghost girl is doing?” I said. “She put the old lady and the wolf man into trances?”

“And made them go kill crazy,” Dean added.

“Could be,” Sam said, as we headed towards the other side of the park. “You know, kinda like spirit hypnosis or something.”

“Trances I get,” said Dean, “but fairy tale trances?”

He was about to step forward when I spotted something on the path. I gasped and quickly threw my hand in front of him, to stop him stepping on a large toad. It had hopped onto the path in front of us and was now sitting in place, croaking.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Sam said. “That’s completely normal.”

I got down onto my knees to look at it. It was just sitting there in the middle of the path. A toad, in a park, well away from any water source… Not normal.

“Hey there, little buddy!” I said, squinting at it.

It just croaked again, and so I reached out to touch it. I figured it would just hop away, being a wild animal and all, but it sat completely still as my finger brushed down its rough, leathery skin. Turns out toads aren’t slimy at all.

“It’s kinda cute,” I said, looking up at the boys.

I shuffled a little, to get a better look at its face. Its big bulbous eyes were just staring straight forward.

“Maybe it’s hypnotised too?” Sam suggested.

“Well… something’s got it acting weird,” I said, watching the way its throat bulged out as it croaked.

Extending my pointer finger again, I moved it very slowly towards the toad’s face, giving it plenty of opportunity to flee, but it just kept staring ahead, not even paying attention to me. I gave it a very soft tap between the eyes and it responded with another croak.

“Kiss it, Ellie!” Dean said. “Maybe one kiss from a Princess will sort this whole thing out.”

I scowled at him as Sam pulled on my arm to help me get back to my feet. “If I was willing to kiss toads, Dean, you’d have made it with me by now.”

“Ha!” Sam laughed, as we got moving again, carefully stepping around the strange, placid little creature.

Dean ignored me with all the confidence of a man who knew perfectly well how attractive he was, and knew I knew too. “All right, so maybe it is fairy tales.”

We had reached the street on the other side of the park now, and the Impala was parked just a short distance away. But Sam had spotted something. He pointed to a house on the other side of the road. There was a pumpkin on the porch, with a mouse sniffing around it.

Pumpkin coach, mouse horses. Cinderella came to mind immediately for me, but Dean obviously hadn’t read a lot of fairy tales when he was young.

“Yeah? It’s close to Halloween,” he said.

“You remember Cinderella?” asked Sam. “With the pumpkin that turns into a coach, and the mice that become horses?”

Dean stared at him. “Dude. Could you be more gay?”

As if having read fairy tales as a child had even the slightest thing to do with a person’s sexuality! I rolled my eyes at Dean as dramatically as possible. This was the kind of bullshit that made me want to smack him in the face.

“Could _you_ be more pathetic?” I asked him, as I grabbed Sam’s hand. “Come on, Sam. Let’s check it out.”


	36. Chapter 35: Letting Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After another Fairy Tale becomes real, Ellie and the boys figure out how to solve the case. And maybe there’s a lesson here for Sam.
> 
> This chapter takes place during Episode 3x05.

With my hand in Sam’s, I marched across the road, hoping my walk showed just how irritated I was. I felt a little knot of discomfort in the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t have been surprised really, knowing Dean, and having known his father. They both had some pretty old fashioned ideas about manliness. So did my father, for that matter. And, well, most people say something homophobic every now and then, don’t they?

But it’s different when you actually hear it. When someone you know, and have been sleeping in a room with, night after night, actually says something that makes you realise they have certain opinions. Dean was “just joking”, but it’s hard to tell how much someone means what they say. There’s a thin line between joking and being serious. Maybe Dean really did have a strong opinion about who should sleep with who, and that made me very uncomfortable.

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “He says stuff like that sometimes. I’m not offended.”

I let go of Sam’s hand as we climbed the stairs onto the porch.

“Well… I am.”

I pretended to look at the pumpkin, as Sam straightened beside me. I wasn’t really looking at anything, a hazy cloud of fear had settled across my vision for a second as I realised that maybe I should not have said that.

“But you’re not…” Sam started. “Are you?”

“That’s a pretty personal question, Sam.” And way too difficult to answer in a few moments.

“Uh… yeah,” he said. “Sorry. So… should we knock?”

I finally let my breath out, hoping that he really would leave the conversation there. Dean came up behind us as Sam knocked on the door. Trying to avoid him, I peered in the window, but everything looked normal inside.

Sam knocked again and I thought I heard something inside, maybe a voice shouting? It might have been a TV? But if someone was home, why didn’t they answer?

Dean picked the lock pretty quick and easy. He went in first, followed by Sam before I finally went in after them, pushing my discomfort down as deep as I could. We fanned out, each of us moving in a different direction.

There was a bang, not loud, but as though someone had dropped something, perhaps. Sam and Dean drew their guns, and I got the knife from my belt. The sound had come from the next room, maybe? Sam was closest to the door, and began to move towards it when a voice called out.

“Help! I’m in here!”

He ran through, and I followed him, Dean close behind. We came into the kitchen, perfectly ordinary and like you might see in any house. Except for the girl handcuffed to the oven. She was a pretty blonde, maybe sixteen, dressed in torn sweatpants and t-shirt. Her arms were all bruised, like someone had grabbed her by them and squeezed her hard. Some of them were more faded than others too, so it seemed like it had happened more than once.

There was more bruising on her wrists, where the handcuffs had rubbed against her.

“Hey! It’s okay!” I told her, getting down on my knees beside her.

“You have to help me! She’s a lunatic!” said the girl.

“Dean, the lock picks!” I told him, and he fumbled for a second but got them to me pretty quick.

As I started looking for the right tool, I kept talking to her. “What happened? Who did this?”

“My step mom, she just freaked out!” the girl told me. “Screamed at me, beat me, chained me up.”

“Where is she now?” asked Sam.

She didn’t know. I grabbed something that looked the right size, vaguely aware of the boys moving behind me.

“I’m Ellie,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder as I peered at the handcuffs. “It’s gonna be okay. I’ll get you out real quick.”

I can pick handcuffs while I’m wearing them, so to get them off someone else is a piece of cake. I had to lean into the poor girl a little bit to get a good angle, but a few little clicks and I had one hand out, and then the other.

With both hands free, she grabbed me and held onto me tightly. I looked up at Sam and Dean, then, to find they had both left the room. Wherever they were, it didn’t matter. It seemed like wicked step-mom wasn’t home and I’d freed Cinderella. I sat with her a minute or two, rubbing her back, until Sam came back in.

“Ellie…” he muttered, urgently. “Ellie…”

“She’s okay,” I told him. “But I better call the police.”

“Yeah,” he said, obviously not picking up what I was putting down.

“I’m going to ring the cops,” I said. “And the cops will come here.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “Yeah, okay. Do that.”

 

* * *

 

Poor Cinderella (real name: Becky) was still crying when the cops and paramedics arrived. Sam and Dean, with their criminal records and posing locally as detectives, had long since disappeared, saying they’d meet me back at the car.

I had to stay and explain to the cops that I’d heard Becky’s shouting and broken in to try and help, a story they believed, as she corroborated it. I’d already pocketed the lock picks and Becky, bless her, just said I had gotten the handcuffs off without explaining how, or that I’d had other people with me. After making my statement, I was free to leave and I hurried down the street to where the boys were waiting for me.

Dean was leaning against the Impala, while Sam sat on the hood, turning a red apple over and over in his hands, like he was trying to decide whether or not to eat it.

“She’s okay!” I said, as I got near them. “She’s headed to hospital.”

“So… we saw the kid,” Dean said. “Little girl, pale skin, dark hair.”

“In the house?” I asked.

“Yep,” said Sam, as he got his feet back on the ground. He handed me the apple. “Gave us this.”

Dark haired and pale skin? Of course! Maybe with the apple, she was trying to make something clear to Sam and Dean.

“So, our ghost is Snow White?” I asked. “Great. But how does that help us? Still gotta find the kid.”

“Sam says the poison apple puts Snow White into a really deep sleep,” Dean said. “Right?”

“Right,” I agreed.

“So… maybe our ghost isn’t dead. Maybe she’s in a coma,” said Sam.

“Can… can comatose people be ghosts?” I asked.

“Astral projection,” Dean said. “That’s a thing, right?”

“Right.”

“So… hospital,” said Sam.

Dean opened the back door for me, and I wondered if it had something to do with my obvious offense at his earlier remark. He even shut it for me again after I got in, something he would never normally have done. He didn’t say anything about it as he got into the driver’s seat, though. But Dean didn’t tend to be one for a verbal apology. I frowned at the back of his head, not sure how I felt about it. Maybe he _was_ sorry. But maybe he wouldn’t be, if he understood why I was offended.

 

* * *

 

I had to let the “detectives” do the talking when we got to the hospital. I hung around in the waiting area, watching them talk to a nurse. When they were done, they came back to talk to me.

“So get this,” Sam said. “No little girls, but there is Doctor Garrison’s daughter.”

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Adult,” Dean said. “But she’s got dark hair and the nurse says she’s been here a while. I mean, years…”

“Okay…” I said. “So maybe her spirit is the form she was in when she went into the coma. That makes sense. Where is she?”

Sam led the way along the corridors of the hospital, towards the room the nurse had given. It was in a quiet corridor, away from the bustle of the new patients coming in. We passed several silent rooms in the same corridor, and looking in, I saw sleeping patients. Maybe they were comatose, or critically ill. Many of them were elderly.

We heard Doctor Garrison’s voice as we got near.

“…and the huntsman stepped inside, and in the bed lay the wolf.”

Looking through the door, we saw him, sitting beside a bed. His daughter, Callie, was indeed very pale, and she had a lot of long, black hair. She was hooked up to the monitors, but she looked peaceful, lying so still as her father read to her from a book.

“So the huntsman took a pair of scissors and cut open the wolf’s belly.”

I nudged Sam and he nodded, understanding my meaning. Even Dean knew enough to recognise that Callie was hearing fairy tales while she slept.

Doctor Garrison noticed us, and he put the book down and came over to the door. “Detectives? Can I help you?”

“We just… we heard Callie is your daughter,” Dean said.

“And we wanted to say how very sorry we are,” Sam added.

This seemed to surprise Doctor Garrison, and he responded with just a nod and a “Well, thank you.”

He was obviously headed out, and we followed him, walking along with him. As we walked, we asked him a few questions, trying not to seem like we were prying too much. He said that she had been in hospital since she was eight, after swallowing some bleach, though he didn’t know how she could have gotten the bottle. His wife had brought her in to the hospital. He was surprised when I guessed that his wife was Callie’s stepmother. Apparently she had passed away, but she was the only mother Callie had ever known.

He had gone back to work then, leaving us to contemplate everything we’d learned.

“So, obviously step-mom gave the kid bleach, but why?”

“Could be like Mischa Barton,” said Dean. Sam and I both stared at him. “Sixth Sense, not the OC.”

I had never seen the Sixth Sense, since I hated any movie with a remotely supernatural theme. Apparently Sam hadn’t seen it either. He was as confused as I was.

“You know fairy tales, I know movies,” said Dean. “She played the pasty ghost. You know, the… remember? The mom had that thing, you know, where you keep the kid sick so you get all the attention?”

I had never heard of “that thing”. Who would do that? Harm their own child for the sake of attention?

“Oh, yeah yeah yeah!” Sam said. “Um… Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Could be.”

“It’s a real thing?” I asked, and he nodded.

“So, say all these years, Callie’s been suffering silently because nobody knows the truth about what mommy dearest did?” Dean suggested.

We had reached the entrance to the hospital now, where the nurses triaged patients coming in to the ER, and people sat and waited to hear news on the uncomfortable plastic chairs.

“Okay,” I said. “So, maybe she’s angry?” I suggested. “Her mom poisoned her and got away with it and it’s like nobody knows or cares? So she’s mad… lashing out?”

“Right,” Dean agreed. “Meanwhile, she has to listen to Dad tell her these deranged stories about a rabid wolf or a cannibalistic old lady. It’s enough to drive anybody nuts.”

“How do we stop her, though?” I asked. “Can’t burn her bones, she’s still alive.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely not an option,” said Sam.

The whole area become a flurry of activity as paramedics came in, wheeling through an old lady on one of those ambulance stretchers. A doctor came over right away, while the nurses stood around ready for anything. I tried to listen in, but didn’t understand everything the paramedics were saying.

I understood “multiple lacerations and puncture wounds” well enough, and definitely understood when they suggested she might have been mauled by a dog or a wolf. Hadn’t Callie just heard Little Red Riding Hood?

They covered over the old lady, and I realised she must have died. But… what about her granddaughter? There probably was one, somewhere, and she was about to get attacked too. I pointed that out to the boys, who immediately rushed over to see if they could find out who the woman was and how we could get to her granddaughter.

They came back with an address. “Ellie, you gotta find a way to stop Callie,” Dean said.

“Me? Where are you going?”

“We gotta go stop the Big Bad Wolf,” said Dean. “Which is the weirdest thing I’ve ever said. Come on, Sam!”

I watched them both hurry out the doors together, leaving me alone, and wondering how I was supposed to stop a ghost who wasn’t dead. Maybe I could go and talk to Callie? Tell her I knew what had happened to her?

It was worth a shot. I quickly made my way back through the hospital, down this corridor and then that, until I got back to that sad, silent stretch of hallway. I found Callie’s room again and peered in. She was alone, still lying back in that neat, pristine bed. I tiptoed in, awkwardly, but then realised I shouldn’t. It wasn’t like I could wake the poor girl, and anyway, even if I could, that would be a good thing.

Grabbing the chair, I sat down in it.

“Um… uh… Hi, Callie. My name’s Ellie. I know what you’re doing and I know why you’re angry. Your stepmom hurt you, right? And you want someone to make it right? Well… I know and I can make it right, but you need to stop what you’re doing, okay? Because you’re hurting people, Callie.”

How would I know if it was working? Maybe she’d appear to me? Talk to me?

“I know you can hear what people say to you,” I said. “And I know you’ve been trying to talk to people. You appeared to my friends, gave them an apple. Cos you want someone to listen to you, right? I’ll listen, Callie. If you come, I’ll listen, okay? Please…”

“Hey!” I looked up, it was Doctor Garrison. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

Of course he was pissed. I’d be pissed if I found a total stranger leaning in close to my comatose child and talking urgently to her.

“I’m… Doctor Garrison, I have to talk to you…”

“Who are you? You’re with those detectives?” He came into the room and I quickly got up from the chair and came to meet him.

“This is hard to explain,” I said. “But the attacks that have happened in town. The three builders, the old lady cannibal and the woman that got mauled just now. We think it might have something to do with Callie.”

“That’s ridiculous!” he said. “Get out!”

He tried to walk past me to get to the bed, but I grabbed his hand. “Please,” I said. “Please… just listen. Do you believe in ghosts?”

Just about to snatch his hand back, he stopped and stood still, looking right at my face. There was a moment of silence, as he looked at me, obviously trying to get a sense of who I was.

“You… have you seen her too?”

I shook my head. “But my friends have. She had a white dress, and a red ribbon in her hair.”

“I sensed her,” he said, as I let his hand drop. He moved towards the bed, looking at his still, lifeless daughter as he spoke. “Her presence, her scent. I even saw her standing at the foot of my bed but I never believed it. I thought I was dreaming…”

“No,” I said. “Callie’s trying to tell you something and she needs you to listen.”

“What?” he asked. “What could she be trying to tell me?”

I sighed. This was going to be awful for him to hear. “I think… I think maybe what happened with the bleach wasn’t an accident. Maybe your wife… maybe it was deliberate…”

He turned to look at me. “No. That isn’t possible. Julie loved Callie!”

How could I explain to him how it was possible when I didn’t know how it was myself? I didn’t understand how anyone could poison a child, let alone their own. “I don’t know. But… Doctor, Callie is angry and frustrated. She wants you to know the truth but no one will listen. Please listen to her.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. But he looked more like a man who didn’t want to believe it.

“She’s killing people,” I told him, as he dropped heavily into the chair. “She’s lashing out because she doesn’t know how to make you listen. Please, tell her you’ll listen.”

He sighed and turned into the chair, to look at his daughter again. Picking up her hand, he held it in his. “Callie? Callie, it’s Daddy. It’s me, Daddy. Is it true? Mommy did that to you? I know I wasn’t listening before, but I’m listening now. Daddy’s here. Please, honey, is… is there any way that you can tell me?”

She appeared beside him, just as Sam and Dean had described her to me. A pretty little girl, but very sad looking, with such beautiful shiny black hair. Her white dress and red ribbon really did remind me of Snow White, and given what had happened to her, it was no surprise the story had resonated with her as she lay comatose. She looked so sad as she stood beside her father.

“Look,” I said. “She’s here.”

Doctor Garrison looked up. She was right there, in broad daylight and he couldn’t fail to believe his own senses. “Is it true?” he asked her.

She nodded, as tears started to form in her father’s eyes. “Oh, I’m so sorry, baby. But listen to me. You gotta stop what you’re doing okay? You’re hurting people. I know everything now. I know the truth. It’s time for you to let go. It’s time for me to let you go.”

I had to blink repeatedly to keep myself from crying as he leant over Callie and kissed her on the forehead. As he straightened himself up, her monitor flatlined. She had heard him and understood, and now she had chosen to let go.

 

* * *

 

I stayed with Doctor Garrison for a while, offering him a hand on the shoulder and someone to talk to, if he wanted it. He didn’t, and soon enough Sam and Dean returned, reporting that the little girl was okay, and the big bad wolf had come to his senses. The police had picked him up, poor guy, and surely he’d be charged with the murders he’d committed under Callie’s influence. I felt bad for him, but what could I do about it?

I felt bad for Doctor Garrison too, as we left him in the hospital. “I should’ve let her go a long time ago,” he’d said.

“That’s some good advice,” Dean said, once the three of us were alone.

“Is that what you want me to do?” Sam asked. “Just let you go?”

But Dean still had not answered by the time we got back to the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I was always intending that Ellie would be queer, because if there's one thing Supernatural needs as much as more women, it's more queer characters. I wasn't sure when or how that aspect of her character would come up, but with the events of 10x21 being so painful for so much of the fandom, combined with Dean's homophobic remark in this episode, it seemed like the time.


	37. Chapter 36: The Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Ellie tells Sam something she’s never told anyone before. But the next morning, trouble is brewing…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter is set between 3x05 and 3x06

Dean dropped Sam and I back at the motel before driving off to find food. Once we got in, Sam sat down heavily on the bed, with a wince.

“So… uh… the wolf guy bit me,” he said. I rushed over to him and he held up a hand. “It’s fine, I’m not bleeding out. Guy wasn’t an actual wolf. Could you take a look, though?”

He pulled his shirt and jacket down to reveal the mark on his neck. I could clearly see the imprint of human teeth, and it was bleeding a little, and had definitely started to bruise. I had him take his jacket off and unbutton his shirt while I went to wash my hands.

When I came back, he was sitting obediently on his bed, jacket off and shirt unbuttoned most of the way down. Unlike Dean, who usually fought me off when I tried to look at an injury, Sam always did as he was asked and followed my advice. I got the first aid stuff out of my bag and brought it over to him. I had bought a few supplies to add a little professionalism to the first aid kit, including actual antiseptic wash, which was a far more effective and cheaper alternative to washing a wound out with whiskey.

“Okay,” I said, grabbing a chair to sit in front of him. “Take that arm out of the sleeve.”

It wasn’t too bad, but God knows what bacteria were in there, so I’d have to give it a clean.

“Thanks, Ellie,” he said. “I’d just deal with it myself, but it’s kinda hard to reach.”

“No problem,” I said, pouring the antiseptic out onto a clean cloth, and focusing on that instead of the beautiful bulge of his perfect bicep.

He didn’t even wince as I wiped the antiseptic over the bite mark. It looked like skin had been broken just under the two top front teeth as well as three spots at the sides of the bite. There were four little punctures overall, with that mark from the big front teeth the deepest.

“The bruise will be nasty,” I said. “People will think it’s a hickey.”

He smiled, as I turned the cloth over to pour out a little more antiseptic for a second wash, just to be sure.

“Um… Ellie?” he asked.

“Yup?”

“I’m sorry I asked what I asked before. It’s none of my business. But… uh… I know it sucks, having to hide part of yourself from someone you see every day. So, uh… if there’s anything you wanted to tell me, I’m okay with it. Whatever it is.”

I smiled. Classic Sam. As I leaned in to wipe down the wound a second time, I thought about it. The thing was, I did hide it. All the time. My father had no idea, and I couldn’t imagine any circumstance where I’d ever tell him. He didn’t need to know and he wouldn’t want to. Nobody in my life was more important than my father. This… thing… was just a tiny part of me, and why destroy my relationship with my Dad when it wasn’t something he needed to know? Maybe one day, if things happened right, it would be necessary to tell him, but for the time being, it would only make him hate me for no reason.

At first, when I was young, I figured it was normal, so I didn’t mention it because of that. Why bother, when I thought everyone was the same? Then I realised other girls weren’t like me, and then I told myself it was nothing and I was just confused and imagining things. After all, I liked boys, the way everyone said I was supposed to, so anything else that seemed weird was probably just my imagination. Then I couldn’t keep ignoring it, but I just told myself it was a one-off. Every time it was a one-off and just a thing that happened and I wasn’t really  _that way_. I was in college and just trying new things, that was all.

But I was that way and I always had been.

“You know how you get hungry, right?” I asked, putting the cap back on the antiseptic bottle. “But, also you get thirsty, too?”

“Yeah,” said Sam, as he started to pull his shirt back on.

“Well… I guess you’ve probably noticed that sometimes I get very very hungry…”

He smiled. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.” I looked down at his fabulous chest, and his enormous, strong hands as he started to reach for his shirt buttons, and I blushed.

I got up to put the first aid stuff away. “Well… I also get thirsty,” I said, trying to figure out if I could maintain the metaphor so I wouldn’t have to use  _that word_. “And sometimes I get thirsty without even seeing a drink, so I go out and… um…”

Even while I rummaged around in my bag for nothing in particular, I could feel Sam sitting on the bed, turned towards me.

“I eat a lot more than I drink,” I said, still blushing intensely, but from shame more than the thought of Sam. “But I do drink, sometimes. Um… remember the other week when I said I was going out on my own and didn’t want you guys to come?”

“You went to… get a drink?” Sam asked.

We were in Chicago, and a big city like that, well, there’s places you can go and the people you meet there are the right kind of people. You just gotta delete the search history on your computer and get a taxi to drop you four blocks away and then you’re golden.

She was so pretty. Curly red hair, and bright green eyes and a smile that made me feel like actual sunshine was pouring straight into my heart. Every time she laughed, a little bit of pink swept across her freckly cheeks, and it was such a big, loud, unashamed sound. She had tiny little hands, and such soft, smooth skin, with those sweet brown freckles all over, just making her skin seem all the paler by contrast. Her voice was as soft as her laugh was loud and she was funny, and kind and said such sweet things about my hair and my face. Her name was Charlotte and it was so much better than anything had been since I left home. It was always better.

“Yeah,” I said, snatching up a pair of jeans and folding them up properly, as my whole face burned with a mixture of pleasurable memory and terrible shame.

“Well, that’s okay,” Sam said, still sitting behind me. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at his face and see he was lying, that he couldn’t tell me the truth, but that it wasn’t okay at all.

“I don’t do it all the time,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like I’m…” I couldn’t say the word. Not even to deny it. Saying the word made it real. It would turn it from something I did sometimes to part of who I was and I couldn’t be that.

“Okay,” was all Sam said. Not a fast, dismissive okay, but a soft, gentle word to suggest that he really did think it was okay.

“Don’t you ever tell anybody!” I said. “I mean it, Sam, don’t ever!”

I could hear him get up as I wiped frantically at the tears welling up in my eyes. I couldn’t make them go away by the time I felt him crouch beside me. I rubbed desperately at my tears with my right hand, while he reached out for my left.

“Ellie, I would never tell somebody else your business. Come here.”

He stood back up, pulling me with him and then took me with him to sit on the bed. That was it. All it took was one arm around my shoulders and I didn’t have the will to stop myself any more. At least I was crying silently, staring at a mark on the carpet while huge tears slid down my hot cheeks.

“If Dean thinks there’s something wrong with you because you’ve read fairy tales, what does he think of me, Sam?”

“Dean loves you,” Sam said.

“Until he finds out I sometimes…”  _Sleep with girls_. Just three very simple words, but I couldn’t say them. My throat seized up and nothing would come out.

“I honestly don’t think he’d mind,” Sam’s hand was rubbing up and down my back now. “But we just won’t tell him, okay? Not if you don’t want to.”

“Do  _you_  mind?” I asked, though I knew he’d never tell me if he did.

“Of course not. It doesn’t make any difference to me what you do or who you do it with. Or what words you use to describe that.”

“I… I know there’s a word for me,” I said. “And I know it’s just a description and it’s not offensive but I can’t, Sam… I can’t be that.”

“You don’t have to use any word you don’t want to,” he said.

“And I like guys,” I said. “Okay? Just so we’re clear. I like guys lots!”

“I know that,” he said. “Ellie, you don’t have to explain anything, or justify it or make excuses. You’re still the same person you were this morning, I promise. I don’t see you any differently.”

There was such sincerity and love in his voice, I actually believed him. Not enough to just change how I felt, and leap up and start throwing that terrifying “B” word around like I hadn’t lived twenty-five years of hearing my father say he didn’t get “that whole deal” and girls at school who thought “lesbian” was the biggest insult there was. Sam’s approval wasn’t enough to make up for the teachers who were “concerned” that I didn’t dress feminine enough, or the friends who asked why I would have a picture of Kate Winslet in my locker right next to the one of Brad Pitt (“I just find her really inspiring, okay!”).

A five minute conversation and a hug was never going to make me feel like I wasn’t wrong and dirty and weird. But for the time being, it was enough to know that there was one person in the world who definitely didn’t hate me for being…

“Bisexual,” I whispered.

“You don’t have to call yourself that if you don’t want to,” said Sam. “But there’s nothing wrong with you, Ellie.”

But I cried anyway.

He must have held me for ten minutes, while I cried. He hugged me. He kissed my head and my cheek. He rubbed my back. It was a weird sort of crying, kind of desperate and hysterical, but also… sort of a relief. I’d never used that word before, and I’d never told anyone the things I had just told Sam before. Had I even cried about it before? With every tear, it felt like a little bit of weight was running down my face, and after ten minutes, it was so much lighter and brighter inside my head. Just saying it, once, had washed everything out and cleared up some of the heavy darkness inside me.

Finally, I managed to stop, breathing evenly again and marvelling at the new feeling. It was as if I’d carried a fifty pound weight all my life, and now I was only carrying forty pounds. Not gone, but better. Just the littlest bit better, but that was more than I’d ever thought I could have.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just… I never told anyone before.”

“I’ve always told you everything,” Sam said. “You were always there to listen, and I’m so sorry. I feel like when you really needed me to do the same for you, I wasn’t there.”

Both my arms flew around his waist so fast that he fell backward, taking me down with him and we both ended up lying on the bed, me half on top of him, with my face buried somewhere in his ribs.

“That was not your fault!” I said, still holding onto him tight as I could.

“Not at first,” he said. “But I should have… what are you doing?”

“I’m holding you hostage until you stop feeling guilty.”

He began to wriggle, and I squished him tighter, wishing for longer arms so I could keep a better grip on him. “Ellie, I’m twice your size!”

“One and a half times, max! Eeeep!”

With one roll, he managed to break my grip on his waist, flip me over and pin me down with his hands on my shoulders and his knees either side of me.

“Get off!” I squealed.

“I’m not even twice your size,” he teased.

I reached for his chest and pushed as hard as I could. I could feel him straining against me, but he was just stronger than me and I was not in a good position, especially with a soft mattress beneath me, making it hard to push off so I could flip him over.

“I thought you were a Black Belt or something!” he said.

“I can knee you in the balls from here.”

He leapt up immediately, leaving me lying on the bed, looking up at him and laughing at his panicked face. As soon as I threatened to hit him where it would hurt, he had shot off the bed like he had springs.

I got back to my feet, and figured I had better go to the bathroom, in case I had gross red sobbing eyes. I didn’t need Dean asking questions when he got back. On the way, I stepped towards Sam, and he flinched nervously, until I got up on my toes and kissed him on the cheek.

“Thanks. I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said. “No matter what.”

* * *

The next morning, I was woken by someone shaking me roughly. Sam normally woke me much more gently, but someone was gripping my shoulder and rocking my whole body with such agitation.

I tried to bat them out of the way, as I opened my eyes. Confused morning Ellie, with hair everywhere and the blanket tangled up in her legs, blinking at the light. As I adjusted to being awake, I realised who was shaking me.

“Dean?”

“Did Sam say anything to you last night?”

“Huh? What? No!” The only conversation Sam and I had alone had been in the late afternoon, and there was no way Dean could have known about that, was there?

“So, you didn’t hear him leave?”

I sat up, pushing all my hair back and out of the way as I did. “What? Where is he? Is he okay?”

“He went out to run or whatever. But I think he went out last night too.”

I wasn’t used to being woken so early and without coffee. “Maybe he couldn’t sleep, I dunno…”

Suddenly, Dean was waving a gun in my face and I was fully awake in a moment. Instinct took over and I reached under my pillow for the knife.

“Whoa! Hey…” he said. “Calm down.” He put the gun down onto my knees, on top of the blanket and I looked at it, confused, with my knife still in my hand. It was the Colt. I put the knife back under my pillow and reached out to pick up the Colt.

“Dean, I’m confused.”

“It’s missing a bullet,” he said. “Since yesterday morning. We were together all day, so someone took it out sometime in the night and fired it. It sure as hell wasn’t me.”

At first I thought he accusing me, and I was about to protest but then I realised what he’d said earlier and managed to get my morning brain to connect all the dots. “Oh, Sam…”

“Son of a bitch went behind my back!” he shouted, getting back up to his feet, like the force of his anger was propelling him upwards.

Okay, so Sam had suggested summoning up a Crossroads Demon and then threatening her with the Colt so she’d give back Dean’s contract. If that didn’t work, then he’d proposed shooting her. And now, he’d taken the Colt in the night and fired it. But that didn’t mean he’d gone and shot a Crossroads Demon. Possibly. Maybe…

I tried to think of some other explanation, some other reason Sam would sneak out with a demon-killing gun in the middle of the night, without telling either of us, and fire it.

“Have you talked to him this morning?” I asked, getting myself up.

“For five minutes. Didn’t say anything about it!”

That didn’t sound good. If Sam had a good reason for taking the gun and firing it, he’d surely have told Dean about it right away. He wasn’t usually a liar. And he was desperate to find a way to save Dean’s life.

“Maybe he’s just looking for the right way to tell you?” I suggested, trying the concept out as I said it.

“He can’t do this shit, Ellie! My contract says Sam dies if we try to break the rules.”

I was aware of that, of course, but I appreciated that Dean was not in an emotional state to think clearly. He needed to shout a little bit, and I could understand that.

“Well, he came back, so we know he didn’t die. Maybe it worked? He broke the contract?”

“Then why wouldn’t he say that?”

Good question. “I don’t know,” I said, handing Dean back the Colt. “Okay… so… I think you should put it back, pretend you haven’t noticed. Just give him a chance to come clean and explain what happened. If he doesn’t, then we can confront him and remind him again that this could mean his life.”

“Clearly, he’s not listening!” Dean said, looking in the chamber again. “Dammit, Ellie!”

I couldn’t tell if that was just a general “dammit” of frustration, or if it was directed at me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, although I supposed it could be argued that since I was the one Sam confided in and listened to, I might have stopped him. If I’d known that he planned to go through with his scheme alone, I would certainly have tried to stop him, but I didn’t know and since he didn’t either, Dean could hardly blame me for that.

“Just give him a couple of days to come clean, and then I’ll talk to him,” I said. “He’s not thinking straight. I’ll make him see sense, I promise.”

Dean sighed and grabbed the keys from his pocket, presumably so he could take the Colt back out to the Impala and put it in the trunk. Why had he taken it out in the first place? Was he checking up on Sam? Or had there been something suspicious that made him worry.

Before I could ask, he was out the door. With a sigh, I went to my bag, figuring I might as well get changed, since I was already awake. I looked at the time on the clock beside Dean’s bed. 6:49? What? Dean may have been outraged about the whole Crossroads Demon thing, but being woken up before seven? That was the  _real_  outrage here!

Stupid Winchesters…


	38. Chapter 37: Actual Ghost Ship!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean is mad at Sam for shooting the Crossroads demon. Ellie has feelings about it too, but whatever because ACTUAL GHOST SHIP!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is an extra long chapter because a) sorry about the wait and b) I had nowhere to cut it.
> 
> Episode Guide: Set during 3x06: Red Sky At Morning

Dean and I had agreed to give Sam a week to come clean about taking the Colt. Technically, he had every right to take it. Dean didn’t own the gun personally. It was _their_ gun. My concern was what Sam had taken it for and what he had killed with it. Clearly he hadn’t dropped dead for trying to get Dean out his Crossroads contract, but that might have been sheer luck.

I wanted to visit New York City, but on the way there, we’d caught wind of a case. A woman had drowned in the shower, and that definitely wasn’t normal. It meant a little turn north and into Massachusetts. We were headed for a seaside town and that was pretty exciting for me, whatever happened with the case. I’d been to the coast twice before, once in Florida and once in California and that had been within the past three months. Every glimpse of the ocean was still a novelty for me.

It was nowhere near the week Dean and I had agreed to. Only three nights after Dean had discovered the missing bullet, we were driving the last few miles through Massachusetts. I was in the backseat as usual, and I didn’t notice I was falling asleep until Dean’s loud shout jolted me awake.

“Ellie! Wake up!”

“Huh? What?” I asked, sitting up straighter, my eyes wide open. “I’m okay!”

“So, Sammy says he doesn’t have anything to tell me. Not hiding any secrets. Doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.”

I rubbed at my eyes. We had agreed to wait a week, and we had agreed that I would be the one to try and talk to Sam. But Dean wasn’t exactly the most patient man.

“Dean, you agreed…”

“There’s a bullet missing from the Colt,” Dean said. “You want to tell me how that happened? It wasn’t me. I know it wasn’t Ellie. So, unless you were shooting at some incredibly evil cans…”

Sam must have known it was pointless to keep denying it. Dean had woken me up as a witness and to make it perfectly clear that we both knew what he’d been up to.

“You went after her, didn’t you?” demanded Dean. “The Crossroads Demon. After I told you not to!”

“Yeah, well…” Sam began.

I couldn’t imagine what justification he would have that Dean would accept and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to try.

“You could have died, Sam! That’s the deal! You could have died!”

“I didn’t,” Sam said.

“And you shot her!” Dean yelled.

It was a tag team scolding, with Sam stuck between us. “She was a smartass!” he said. A response I would have expected out of his brother, but not him.

“So, why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “Is Dean out of his deal or what?”

“You think I wouldn’t have mentioned that?” Sam asked. “She said someone else holds the contract.”

“Someone else?” I asked. So, the Crossroad Demon made the deals, but someone else held the contracts? Some superior, maybe? That did make a kind of sense. “Who?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Well we should find out who,” said Dean. “Of course out best lead would be the Crossroads Demon. Oh… wait a minute…”

“That’s not funny,” Sam said.

“No part of this is funny, Sam!!!” I reminded him. “We’re talking about your life, here! I promised to help you do this safely!”

Dean took his eyes off the road to glare back at me for a second. “Dammit, Sam! It’s bad enough you conned Ellie into helping you do exactly what I asked you not to do. But now you’re going behind _her_ back, too? Jesus!”

“She wouldn’t help me! I had to try!”

“You shouldn’t have done it!”

“You’re my brother, Dean! No matter what you do, I am gonna try and save you. And I’m sure as hell not gonna apologise for it, alright?”

Dean’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, and he was suddenly really focused on the road. Sam gave an exasperated shake of the head, and turned back to look at me. I thought for a moment he was going to say something, probably angry that I was still taking Dean’s side on the issue. I just glared at him. He wasn’t going to apologise for trying to protect Dean’s life. Dean wasn’t going to apologise for doing the same for Sam. They were trying to save each other, regardless of the consequences.

I wanted to save both.

 

* * *

 

At least it was late by the time we rolled into town, and we still had to look for a motel. We didn’t find one, and I thought our only option was going to be some fancy hotel by the water. But Dean preferred to squat in an empty house. At first I was going to object, but what the hell difference did it make? I always slept on the floor anyway, and unlike the guys, I had a comfy bedroll. It’d be like camping, only inside.

We found an abandoned house, two stories, and pretty old looking but structurally sound and safe. There was no running water, which was a shame, but if we didn’t clear things up quickly, I could always head to a swimming pool or somewhere else with public showers. Unlike camping, there was no convenient stream to wash in.

There were four bedrooms upstairs which meant exciting new opportunities for privacy. One of them even had a bed. We let Dean flop down onto it and fall straight to sleep. He’d been the one doing all the driving, and we could always swap the next night. Sam went out to the Impala to get the sleeping bags and a blanket for me. Meanwhile, I brushed my teeth in the cracked bathroom sink and used a bottle of water to scrub a few key areas so I wouldn’t smell awful.

I found Sam in the living room, sitting on the abandoned sofa with the sleeping bags and blanket. I flopped down beside him, and turned to look at him. He was waiting for me, so it was pretty reasonable to figure he had something he wanted to say, right? But he opened his mouth once and closed it again.

After waiting a moment longer, I decided to just go for it and start the conversation instead. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what he wanted to talk about.

“He’s been told his whole life he has to take care of you,” I said. “He sold his actual soul. You can’t be surprised he’s worried.”

“I didn’t ask him to do that!” It started as almost a yell, before he quickly lowered his voice, obviously remembering Dean was upstairs asleep.

“I know you didn’t,” I said, keeping my own voice soft and calm. “And it wasn’t fair of him to put this kind of guilt on you.”

“So help me…”

“But,” I interrupted him, “he did it. You have every right to be mad about it, but risking your life again to fix it isn’t going to help. You know what my nightmare is?”

“No…”

“It’s you dropping dead because you try and break the deal. And then Dean goes to Hell anyway.”

“Oh…” said Sam.

“Yeah. What Dean did wasn’t fair to you, and I get why it’s hurting you, and you want to fix it. But we have to do it right, or else it’ll just make things worse. We can’t just go back and change the past so you die and he’s safe.”

“But what if we could undo it?” asked Sam. “If there’s a way to undo the deal, so Dean keeps his soul, and I have to die… would you help me?”

I wanted to cry at the very thought. As scared as I was about Dean going to Hell, it was still many months away. Not exactly in the far distant future, but it wasn’t immediate. Even while I worked to prevent it, I could still think of it as a thing that wasn’t quite real, yet. But I’d already experienced Sam dying once, and that had been devastating. Could I handle it a second time? Could I help him to die, even if it was to save Dean from Hell?

There was another question that had been bothering me, deep in the depths of my heart, too. A question I knew the answer to. If we were just talking death, if Hellhounds and eternal torment weren’t a factor, and it was inevitable that one or the other had to die, could I choose? If it came down to losing either Sam or Dean, could I really pick between the brothers? I was deeply ashamed to know that I probably could. I loved them both. But equally? No.

But Hell _was_ a factor, and it wasn’t just a matter of one of them dying. The choices were Sam alive and Dean in Hell or Dean alive and Sam dead. Just dead and at peace. Well then, the answer was easy. I had to choose Dean’s life. His eternity in Hell was not worth Sam’s life, a maximum of eighty years. It just wasn’t a fair exchange.

“I want to save you both,” I said.

“But if we can’t?”

“I guess… if you’re willing to die and go… wherever it is you’d go, then that’s better than Dean going to Hell. But it’s not my first choice, Sam. It’d be a last resort.”

“But you’d take care of him, right? You and Bobby? If I was gone, you’d make sure he was okay?”

Oh God. He was serious. He was really considering death and somehow that felt more immediate and terrifying to me than Dean’s eventual death in seven months time. I instinctively reached out and grabbed Sam’s hand on top of the blanket on his knees.

“No… we can’t talk about that yet, okay. Not yet! We’ll think of something else.”

My two hands barely fitted around one of his. He flipped his hand over somehow, so that I lost my grip. But he kept hold of my left hand, and I guess it gave him something to look at as he ran his thumb over my skin, up and down. He stared at my hand in his.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I know you’re doing everything you can to help.”

He looked so sad and so tired. Maybe he wanted to die to save Dean because it was easier than the worry and the fear he was feeling. We were sitting in the half light, and it was getting real late. We had a case in the morning, and Sam was going to need to sleep. How could he, when he was feeling so dark and hopeless?

Maybe I couldn’t save Dean for him, but I could at least try and make him smile a little, give him some good thoughts to try and push out some of the bad ones.

“We’ll think of something,” I said. “Anything can happen in seven months.”

“I guess,” he said, but he definitely didn’t believe it.

“It might seem like we haven’t made any progress, but we know all kinds of things that won’t work, and that will help us focus the research on things that might.”

This almost earned me a smile. The corners of his mouth turned up, just the slightest bit. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”

“And in the meantime, we’re working cases, helping people! Doing what we do.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up?” he asked.

“Depends, is it working?”

“A little,” he admitted. “Hard not to feel a little better with you being aggressively optimistic.”

Aggressively optimistic? I liked that. That was a good description for me. Ellie Singer: forcing folks to smile since 1982.

“You know, one of the best ways to make yourself smile is to try not to,” I told Sam.

He forced his neutral face into a firm frown. “If you say so.”

“I can make you smile,” I said. “I can make anyone smile.”

He shook his head, probably because it’s harder to maintain a frown when you talk.

“I got skills, Sam. You know, I can even make my father smile.”

He shook his head again. “That’s not possible. Bobby doesn’t smile. His mouth doesn’t work that way.”

“He smiles at my jokes. One time, when I was nine, _he even laughed_. He laughed, Sam. That’s my superpower. Making even the grumpiest people happy. You’ll be a pushover.”

Avoiding looking at my face, he was still frowning with determination, but it was more of a grimace, as I could see the strain as he tried to avoid smiling at me. It’s totally true that trying not to smile makes you more likely to do it. Try it some time. There’s something about forcing yourself to frown that makes everything seem funnier and more cheerful as you fight against it. I used that strategy myself sometimes. The effort of trying to be grumpy makes you forget what you’re actually sad about.

He couldn’t avoid looking at me as I extended a long finger towards his face, and tickled his cheek where one of his dimples usually appeared.

“Come on, Sammy. Let’s see those little dimples.”

“No,” he said.

“Don’t fight it,” I teased. “Bring out the face craters. They’re so cute!”

“No they’re not.”

“You’re adorable and you know it.” He shook his head, fiercely fighting me and frowning more deeply than any real sorrow had ever made him frown. He was overcompensating. “Should I wake up Dean and ask him? Ask him if you’re adorable?”

He shot me his angry bitchface and that was real, because if I told Dean I thought his brother was adorable, that was something he would never let go of. Sam would be mercilessly mocked for it.

“Oh, oh… you’re bringing out bitchface?” I asked. “Okay… then I’m bringing out the big guns.”

There was one thing that always made my father smile, no matter how mad at me he was trying to be. Aggressive optimism is all very well, but I also knew how to manipulate someone to get what I wanted.

I leant forward and threw both arms around him for a hug, then lifted my head up and kissed him softly on the cheek. Before I even had a chance to let go, he was looking at me with a broad smile, straight teeth and gorgeous dimples turned directly on me with their full mystical power. If the roles had been reversed, all he’d have had to do is smile at me, and I’d have been forced to smile back. When he meant it, Sam’s smile was magic.

“Oh come on,” he protested. “That’s not fair. No one can fight that.”

 

* * *

 

I didn’t know whether my game had made Sam sleep any better, but I hoped it did. As for me, I was plagued by exactly the nightmare I’d told Sam about: him dead, Dean in Hell and me left behind, with nothing I could do about any of it.

When I woke up, I was exhausted and grumpy. I might have been better off not sleeping at all, my night had been so restless. I’d had to sleep on my bag instead of a pillow. The coffee helped a little, preventing me from actually strangling anyone, but I was still short-tempered and probably unpleasant to be around. I didn’t really feel like interviewing an old lady about how her niece had drowned in the shower. The drowning in the shower part was cool, but I was not in a good head space to be talking to the public.

We had to park near the docks, and go a little distance down the boardwalk to get to the victim’s aunt’s place. The sight of the sea cheered me up a little, and the breeze was cool, so I told the boys to go on in and tell me about it after.

I sat on a wooden seat on the boardwalk, watching while tennis-shoed yuppie types did boat stuff. I had no idea what any of it was about, but there was a lot of complicated-looking action involving ropes, and they also seemed to walk the length of their yachts a whole lot. They weren’t really talking each other, but each was clearly aware that others were there. They were all the kind of men who wore cardigans over their shoulders, and I gave them some names and backstories to pass the time. Nigel was just passing a few hours before he went to meet his mistress. Julian was an investment banker and he’d called in sick so he could do stuff with ropes on the deck of his boat. Basil was involved in a bitter custody dispute with his ex-wife, in which they both wanted the yacht and there were also children whose names neither of them could remember.

It was half an hour before Sam and Dean came back. I was so engrossed in considering Julian’s probable cardigan collection that I didn’t hear them coming. The first I noticed them was when Dean’s hand brushed across the back of my head.

“Hey, Princess. Perving on the yacht club crowd, now?”

I shook my head as I stood up. “Horrifying thought.”

“So, Sammy has a new girlfriend,” Dean said with a snigger, as we started heading back down the boardwalk.

“Bite me,” said Sam.

“Not if she bites you first,” Dean grinned. He bent down to whisper to me as we walked. “She wants him bad.”

I pulled a face. Gross. Wasn’t she meant to be seventy-something?

Poor Sam didn’t look very amused by it, and after a brief roll of his eyes, he changed the subject. “So who’s Alex?”

“Another player in town?” Dean asked.

“Alex?” I asked.

“Yeah, our questions made her think we were working with someone called Alex. Could be another Hunter.”

“Doesn’t really matter,” I said. “What else?”

“Apparently, our vic saw a ghost ship,” Dean said.

My day instantly got better. Drowning in the shower was interesting, but ghost ships? Seriously cool.

“Ooh! Seriously?”

“Not the first one sighted around here either,” Sam said. He’d been doing some reading while Dean and I got ourselves ready that morning. “Every thirty-seven years, like clockwork, reports of a vanishing three-mast clipper ship out in the bay. And every thirty-seven years a rash of weirdo, dry land drownings.”

“A rash of them?” I asked. “So… there’s gonna be more mystery drownings?”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“An actual ghost ship, guys!” I said, and Dean winced at the squeak. “Like the _Flying Dutchman_ or the _Griffin!_ ”

Dean looked at Sam, one eyebrow raised. “Is there anything she won’t geek out about?”

“They’re usually death omens, Dean!” I said, my day instantly improved by the prospect of solving a case with an actual ghost ship involved.

“So what happens?” Dean asked. “You see the ship and then a few hours later, you pucker up and kiss your ass goodbye?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And you can try and run from it, but death omens are never wrong! Sometimes running is the thing that gets people killed.”

Sam had a slight smile, but he obviously didn’t find ghostly ships that predicted people’s death to be quite as exciting as I did. “Will you be this enthusiastic after we spend a few hours trying to ID the ship?” he asked.

“She loves that crap,” said Dean. “Anyway, it shouldn’t be too hard. I mean, how many three-mast clipper ships have wrecked off the coast?”

“I actually checked that,” Sam said, and now he was smiling. “Over one hundred and fifty.”

“Wow,” said Dean, as we stepped off the boardwalk and onto the pavement. We were parked pretty close by. “Crap.”

“Time to hit the books!” I said. “You want to come to the library with me again, study buddy?”

Dean turned to look at Sam, and in one fluid, casual movement, mimed shooting himself in the head. Not everyone is a fan of my aggressive optimism.

I laughed at him. If he was determined to be irritated by all my best qualities, I might as well enjoy it. Sam remained quietly neutral, but I could see the slight sparkle in his eyes that meant he was enjoying his brother’s frustration.

A few more steps and we had reached the road. We’d parked the Impala at the back of a small line of parked cars. There was the red curb of the no parking zone. There was the white Lexus that had been in front of us. There was the meter. And there was an empty parking space.

“This is where we parked the car, right?” asked Dean.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Where’s my car?” The agitation in his voice was already apparent, and his breathing was heavy.

“Did you feed the meter?” Sam asked.

“Yes, I fed the meter!” Dean’s voice was rising in tone and volume with every word. “Where’s my car? Somebody stole my car!”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Sam said, trying in vain to soothe his brother. “Calm down, Dea…”

“I _am_ calmed down!” Dean insisted. “Somebody stole my…”

He couldn’t get any more out, his breathing had become too hysterical as he began hyperventilating. He bent down, clutching at his knees. People were looking, obviously wondering what the fuss was, and some of the tennis-shoe crowd seemed very displeased that someone would raise their voice in public, like a common animal. Screw them. They didn’t know what that car meant to Dean. Plus, there was all manner of weaponry in the trunk.

We both rushed to him, and tried to calm him down. As I urged him to breathe in rhythm with me and Sam tried to pull him up straight, footsteps approached and someone with a posh English accent spoke.

“The 67 Impala? Was that yours?”

I looked up. The English woman had amazing cheekbones, beautiful green eyes, brown hair with a nice wave to it and a gorgeous figure. She was wearing a thick brown coat, and it was long enough, and her neck line low enough, that I couldn’t tell what she was wearing underneath. She might have been naked for all I could see. Over all, she was just gorgeous. She was smirking at us as she approached.

“Bela…” muttered Sam.

“Bela?” I whispered. “The one who shot you?”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I had that car towed.”


	39. Chapter 38: Reputation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is trying to work on the case, but she’s just found out she has a reputation among other hunters and she foolishly wants to know what it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think all my chapters are going to be a bit longer now. Just seems to be going that way. Is 3700 words too long? Let me know?
> 
> Episode Guide: Set during 3x06: Red Sky At Morning

My first impression of Bela Talbot was kind of a double vision. Physically, she was super-hot. She was the female Dean. She was one of those women I found confusing because I wasn’t sure if I’d rather be her or be with her.

But, it was a pretty easy decision because emotionally, my whole mind shrunk back from the very thought of her. This was a woman who had declared a callous disinterest about Sam’s imminent death, so long as she made money. Then she’d actually shot him, just to make a point. She hadn’t shot him with any intention of actually killing him, as if that made a difference. Now she was admitting to having Dean’s car towed, apparently just for funsies. What a heartless bitch. No level of hot made that forgivable.

“You what?” Dean asked.

“Well, it was in a tow-away zone,” she said, her expression confused, as though she genuinely had not known the car was Dean’s. Yeah, right!

“No it wasn’t!” he shouted at her.

She smiled. “It was when I was finished with it.”

“What the hell are you even doing here?” demanded Dean.

“A little yachting,” she said, obviously a lie, though she looked and sounded as if she would get along with those tennis-shoed, rope fondling yuppies I had been watching.

“You’re Alex,” Sam said. “You’re working with that old lady.”

“Gert’s a dear old friend,” she said.

I stared at her. Hard to believe someone who made screwing people over her business could possibly have any friends. Certainly not “old” friends that she managed to keep for any length of time.

“You have friends?” I asked.

It was like she was noticing me for the first time, and as she looked me up and down, I got the feeling she had smelled something nasty. Her nose crinkled a little like just looking at me was unpleasant.

“There’s a lot of lovely old women like Gert up and down the eastern seaboard. I sell them charms, perform séances so they can commune with their dead cats…”

“So you con them?” I ask. “How do you sleep at night?”

“On silk sheets, rolling naked in money. I’m sorry, who are you?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Oh, right. Ellie, this is an evil bitch. Bitch, this is Ellie Singer.”

She looked me up and down again. “You’re Bobby Singer’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” I said, glaring at her, and folding my arms with discomfort. I didn’t need her noticing my less than attractive figure or how cheap my clothes were.

She made a small humming sound of surprise. It was one of those things. I just knew she was being deliberately bitchy. I knew she’d made that little noise to provoke me into asking her why. But dammit I wanted to know why! What was surprising about me being my Dad’s daughter?

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing, you’re just not what I imagined.”

“You do know what’s going on here?” Dean interrupted, before I could asked Bela what she had imagined. “This ghost ship thing, it’s real.”

“I’m aware. Thanks for telling Gert the case wasn’t solved, by the way.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “And what did you imagine?”

Dammit, why did I have to be so needy? Asking that question was just playing into her manipulation, and I was bound to dislike the answer, but I went ahead and asked anyway, because I can’t bear knowing people don’t like me, even when I don’t like them.

She looked at me again, not exactly rolling her eyes, but making it quite clear that talking to me was a waste of her time. “I don’t know exactly. But given your reputation, I was expecting something a little less… cowgirl stripper.”

My mouth fell open as I stared at her. “But, obviously all of this,” she gestured vaguely towards me, “is working for you. No accounting for taste, right?”

Sam had remained pretty much silent for the whole exchange, just glaring at Bela as she stood there. But that last remark had evidently crossed a line. I was speechless, but he found words for me. “Just… stay out of our way,” he said. “People are dying here, and we’ve got a case to solve.”

“Calm down, Nancy Drew,” she said. “And really, I expect a bad attitude out of Dean, but you, Sam?”

“You shot me!” he reminded her.

“I barely grazed you. And now you’ve been blabbing to Gert and she’s stopped payment. She wants real answers. So _you_ stay out of _my_ way before you cause any more trouble. I’d get to that car if I were you, before they find the arsenal in the trunk.”

She turned around, before waving to us over her shoulder. “Ciao.”

It was hard to gauge who was the more upset. Dean was furious about his car, Sam was angry about the way she’d brushed off shooting him in the shoulder. As for me… _cowgirl stripper_? I was looking down at my outfit as Dean muttered about shooting the retreating Bela. I was wearing perfectly ordinary jeans and a pink button up cotton plaid, with a jacket appropriate to the chilly climate. Okay, so I could maybe see where she got cowgirl from, but stripper? I didn’t have anything against strippers. Frankly, it seemed like a difficult job and I’d kill for that kind of body confidence. But she clearly meant it as an insult and it was hard not to take it as one.

“I don’t look like a cowgirl stripper, do I?” I asked Sam.

Dean had grabbed his phone, trying to find out where we could go to get the car back.

“Of course you don’t. She was just being bitchy.”

Of course she was. But then, Sam wouldn’t tell me if there was something wrong with the way I dressed anyway, would he?

 

* * *

 

It took us a couple of hours to get to the impound lot, pay the fine, retrieve Dean’s car, stop by the library to check out a couple of books on local shipwrecks, go through the Biggersons drive-thru and then get back to the house.

Dean ate fast and then started cleaning his guns, probably thinking of Bela. Sam and I were skimming through a book each while we ate, looking for ships that fit the description, and keeping an eye out for any significant use of the number thirty-seven that might account for that thirty-seven year cycle of appearances. As interested as I was in ghost ships, though, there was still something else I couldn’t get out of my mind.

I threw the book down. “What did she mean?”

Dean sighed. “Ellie, for the last time, you do not look like a cowgirl stripper. Although, if you wanted to try that out…”

I glared at him, but secretly filed the information away in case I needed to step up our little war. “Not that… she said _given your reputation_. What reputation? Do I have a reputation?”

Sam and Dean looked at one another, and I saw a definite sub-vocal communication pass between them, before they both answered.

“No,” said Sam, suspiciously quickly.

“Nope,” said Dean.

“Really?” I asked. “My Dad is the go-to for half the Hunters in America, but no one ever talks about me?”

Sam was nervously clearing his throat but Dean tried talking his way out of the situation. “Well, yeah, I mean, your name comes up, sure… But reputation? That’s going a bit far, right Sam?”

“Right…” said Sam. “Yeah… You’re… uh… people like you. You’re friendly.”

No way. If all people said about me in Hunter bars was that I was “friendly”, they wouldn’t be fidgety and avoiding the subject like that. I had some kind of reputation and it wasn’t a nice one, or else they’d be honest about it.

“Friendly?” I asked. “You’re hiding behind that book because you didn’t want to tell me people say I’m _friendly_?”

Sam sighed. “Hey, you know what hunter joints are like. Lots of hard drinking, lots of macho talk. Everyone’s trying to outdo everyone.”

I’d been to the Roadhouse enough times. Bunch of alpha males sitting around drinking and exaggerating about the stuff they’d killed, trying to one-up each other all the time.

“They say I’m weak, don’t they?” I asked. “They think I can’t do the job cos I’m a girl.”

 “We don’t think that,” Dean said hurriedly. “We think you kick ass.”

“Right,” Sam agreed.

Of course, I knew that they didn’t think I was weak, especially Sam, but I could see why they didn’t want to tell me. Typical macho Hunter bullshit, thinking that just because I was a woman I couldn’t fight or hunt. Some of these guys hadn’t gotten into the job until well into adulthood, while I was raised in it. But that meant squat to them, because I was just a girl. I knew what they thought. The older guys were the worst, the ones who remembered me trailing after my dad when I was little. Little Ellie Singer, that’s what I would always be.

I went back to my book grumpy, but with a sense of closure. I’d just need some kind of comeback ready for next time I saw Bela. What would insult her? Something about her shoes? Her most obviously unattractive trait was what an incredibly unpleasant person she was, but somehow, I doubted she’d be hurt if I pointed that out. She was proud of it.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I fell asleep, and I dreamt about the Roadhouse, before it burned down. I was drunk and standing on a table, ranting and raving about how I was as good as anyone there and I’d fight anybody and they could all kiss my ass. It was pretty cathartic, really, even if it wasn’t real.

 

* * *

 

That night, there was another mysterious drowning. This victim was a man in his thirties and he’d drowned in his bathroom. Not in the bath, or even in the shower. Just in the bathroom, where he’d been found dead on the floor, water in his lungs.

Obviously, it’s tragic when a person dies and everything. I wasn’t happy the guy was dead. But… it was pretty interesting. In my professional opinion, as a professional investigator of weird deaths, it was super weird and I can’t help it if I find my job interesting, okay! Plus, there had to be a connection between the death omen being a ship and the victims drowning, right? Maybe some spirit was angry about drowning at sea and was taking it out on people.

“All I’m saying is that, as weird supernatural death goes, these drownings are pretty interesting,” I said, as we walked down the rich suburban street.

“Sounds kinda like you’re excited about it,” Sam said.

I rolled my eyes. “Obviously I’m not excited about them being dead. I just mean that, since they are dead and we can’t make them not dead, I find the cause of death to be fascinating.”

“You said _cool_ ,” Sam said. “You said drowning in an empty bathroom was _cool_.”

Dean had gone on ahead of us, but I knew he agreed with me. Bastard was always happy to call on me in an argument, but he split when I needed back-up. Typical.

“I just…”

“And you said death omens are _awesome_ ,” Sam added.

One of the things I loved most about Sam was how compassionate he was. Now it was biting me on the ass. It just went to show that he was a better person than me.

“Professionally,” I said, weakly, knowing my argument was pathetic. “Professionally awesome. Oh God, it’s Bela…”

She was up ahead of us, talking to a skinny white guy, in his thirties and kind of tired and stressed looking. Bela, of course, looked flawless, in a tailored jacket and pencil skirt that looked like it might cost more than my entire wardrobe. She had press credentials around her neck, obviously pretexting as a reporter.

“And a _grieving relative_ ,” Sam said pointedly, hurrying to catch up to Dean.

I stuck my tongue out at his back. Like he’d never found a case interesting or cool! I knew it was just because he was worried about Dean, but he didn’t have to pretend like he was better than I was.

Not that it _was_ pretending, I thought, bitterly. He had always been better than I was in pretty much every respect, but he was usually polite about it.

Loitering on the edge of the crime scene, I saw Sam and Dean approach Bela and the man. They flashed their badges and said something that made her walk away, and I saw her look back at them, obviously very displeased. I might have been callous and interested in weird and gross deaths, but at least I wasn’t Bela.

I tried to keep an eye on all three of them, as she sauntered off. As the boys talked to the witness, Bela approached some uniform cops. Nothing much happened for a while, just two conversations going on at the same time, and both of them way too far off for me to hear. Then Bela started gesturing towards Sam and Dean, which alarmed me, given she was talking to real cops. She might have been saying something about suspecting they weren’t legit.

Thankfully, they noticed, and they wrapped up their conversation, coming back over to me, and together we headed back towards the car. We’d parked a short distance away, a safe distance from the real cops.

“So, his brother saw the ship,” Sam said. “And so did he.”

“They both saw it?” I asked. “So… is whatever it is coming for him too?”

“I think we gotta assume that, don’t we?” asked Dean.

“Then we have to stick with him,” I said. “Whatever it is, we have to save him.”

“I thought you said death omens couldn’t be beaten,” Sam said.

I was actually a little hurt. Maybe I had enthusiasm for an interesting death, but I would never let somebody die without trying to do something. Surely Sam knew that.

“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!” I snapped. “I know you think I’m heartless, but I’m not a total bitch, Sam.”

We returned to the car in total silence. I was too insulted to talk to Sam, he was too disgusted to talk to me and Dean probably didn’t want to deal with either of us, since we were moody. When we got back, Dean opened the trunk, and we each reached for a rifle. I handed around the salt rounds in silence.

“I see you got your car back.” It was Bela, coming up behind us. She must have followed us from the crime scene.

“You really want to come near me when I got a loaded gun in my hands?” asked Dean.

“Now, now,” she said, her accent even thicker while she was being patronising. “Mind your blood pressure. Why are you even still here? You have enough to ID the boat.”

“That guy back there saw the ship,” Sam said, the last to throw his loaded rifle into the trunk.

“Yeah? And?” Bela asked, as Sam slammed the trunk shut.

“And he’s going to die!” I said. “When someone’s life is in danger, you help them!”

“Aren’t you a sweetheart?” she said. “I see why these two like you.”

“Shut up,” said Sam. I was pissing him off enough, he had no patience for Bela.

“He’s cannon fodder. He can’t be saved in time and you know it,” she said.

That was enough for Sam. He just turned around and made his way towards the passenger side door. I followed his lead, and Dean shook his head too, going around to the other side of the car.

“Yeah, well, see we have souls, so we’re gonna try,” Dean said.

“Yeah, well _I’m_ actually going to find the ship and put an end to this,” she sneered. “But you have fun.”

I rolled my eyes, ready to just get in the car and ignore her. But her snide remarks had provoked Dean too far. He moved back towards her.

“Hey Bela, how’d you get like this, huh? What, did Daddy not give you enough hugs or something?”

Oh, wow! That was kind of too far, in my opinion. No matter how rude someone is, that’s no reason to say stuff like that. You never knew if it was true.

“I don’t know,” Bela said, her expression blank. “Your Daddy give you enough?”

She had kind of proved my point, because in Dean’s case it was true, and I could tell he knew it by the way he smiled. It was that little smile he had when he was trying to hide from reality and I wondered for a moment if maybe he and Bela had more in common than he thought.

“Don’t you dare look down your nose at me. You’re no better than I am.” Bela said.

“We help people,” Dean said, and made to turn away like that was the end of the conversation.

But Bela was not done with him. She scoffed audibly. “Come on. You do this out of vengeance and obsession. You’re a stone’s throw away from being a serial killer.”

Dean looked back, over my head and towards Sam. I didn’t know what passed between them, but Dean didn’t look happy when he turned back to hear Bela finish the rest.

“Whereas I, on the other hand, I on the other hand? I get paid to do a job and I do it. So you tell me, which is healthier?” she finished, with a smug smile.

That was it. Maybe I didn’t agree with everything Dean had said to her, but I had been pushed over the edge. Nobody was allowed to be that rude to my boys on my watch! They definitely weren’t allowed to be that harshly accurate.

I stepped forward and grabbed at Dean’s arm to drag him away. “Why don’t you just go away and shoot someone for fun again!” I hissed. “Come on, Dean, we have work to do.”

Bela laughed. “Oh, of course. I was wondering whose girlfriend you were. I didn’t realise you were their mother.”

Dean jolted forward like he was going to punch her, but I dragged him back again, and just shot her a dirty look over my shoulder. We didn’t have to listen to her crap.

 

* * *

 

That night, we sat in the car, outside Peter Warren’s house. He was the brother of the second victim, who’d seen the boat while night diving with his brother.

Dean was watching out the window, while Sam and I read over the print outs we had about the Warren brothers. We were trying to figure out why they were victims, and if they had anything in common with the first victim. They hadn’t known each other, the only thing they had shared was approximate age, so what was the killer looking for? Why target these people? Was it just coincidence, that they happened to see the ship?

But it had been hours, and my mind was starting to wander. Bela’s remark about me being Sam and Dean’s mother had been so viciously calculated. I was sure she knew they didn’t have a mother, and of course, it was a bitchy reminder to me, too. Of course I wasn’t a girlfriend. It was possible, if I played it right and he was bored, that I might someday have meaningless sex with Dean. But beyond that…

It was ridiculous! It wasn’t like I even _wanted_ to date either of them. Of course I didn’t. I wasn’t fifteen anymore and I knew Dean and I would never be romantically compatible. As for Sam… well he was not only out of my league, but he was exactly the kind of decent human being I would never have the good sense to be interested in. So, why was I insulted at being referred to as their mother?

Because I was a needy lunatic who couldn’t stand to know someone disliked me, probably. It was obviously ridiculous to want to be perfect at everything, but I always did. How dare those other hunters talk about me behind my back like that, saying I was no good! Without even noticing the change of subject within my own thoughts, I kept cursing inside my head, before I had a sudden realisation.

Neither Sam nor Dean had actually said yes when I asked if my reputation was for being a weak girl… And anyway, that didn’t make sense with what Bela had said. If she’d heard I was weak and a bad hunter, why would she be surprised by the way I dressed? And what did she mean by saying it was working for me and there was no accounting for taste? How was my dress sense working for me?

“Wait, hang on… what does me being a bad hunter have to do with the cowgirl stripper remark? How was she expecting me to look?”

Dean groaned. “Seriously? We’re back on this?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “What are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing,” Sam said. “Bela was just being rude, it doesn’t have to make sense.”

I knew he was lying. I could hear it in his tone. But I knew who would tell me the truth.

“So, if I call Jo right now and ask her what my reputation is, she’ll say what you said?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” Sam said. “Seriously, you don’t need to worry about this.”

I got out my phone. “Fine. I’ll call her. She’ll be honest with me.”

“I doubt it,” Dean said, and I practically felt the car jolt, Sam nudged him so hard. “Ow! Dammit Sam, if she wants to know so bad, just tell her.”

“I knew it!” I said. People were saying something awful about me and I was determined to know what it was. My mind was full of all sorts of possibilities. “What is it? Am I rude? Do people think I’m mean? Hard to work with?” I tried, remembering what Dean had said about me once. “Stupid? Ugly? Annoying?” I went through all the things I was most sensitive about. “Fat? Bad table manners, what is it, guys?”

Dean had lost patience with me. “Slutty, okay!” he yelled. “People say you’re slutty! But annoying’s a good one! They should say that.”

“Dean!” Sam scolded him, and turned back to look at me.

My mouth was wide open as I stared at the back of Dean’s head.


	40. Chapter 39: Supernova

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An attempt to save a life goes badly, Ellie is very upset about what Dean called her and there is only one solution. Whiskey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the huge delay, but I had to get in a few final things before my term ended. But I'm finished now, so I'll have plenty of free time for a while.

It wasn’t like I had never been called that word before. In fact, there’d been a time people had said it about me so often that it stopped hurting altogether. But I’d been a lot younger then and over time I had gotten used to grown up people who didn’t say that kind of thing. But… maybe adults _did_ say it. Maybe people had been saying it all the way through college and out the other side and all that had changed was that they’d stopped saying it to my face.

If I was honest, I could see how I might have that reputation among other Hunters. How many one night stands were there with guys I met on the job? Six? Seven? But each of them had been just as up for it as I was, and now suddenly they were better than me? I wasn’t the one telling people, either, so whatever reputation I had, at least I wasn’t a tacky blabbermouth.

Then there was… that thing that happened way back when… My dad had caught me making out with Big Jim Howard’s youngest son, Doug. He was twenty-five and I was seventeen and _that_ basically started World War Three. Hunters have their networks and their alliances and now everybody knew that if you wanted to deal with my father you didn’t deal with the Howards. I dimly recalled a few unpleasant words had been said about me at the time, how I’d caused trouble and all that. But once I got a bit older, I realised that Doug was in the wrong, not me. Funny how I never heard anyone blame him, though. However grown-up I might have felt at the time, he was an actual adult and it was his responsibility not to make out with teenage girls. So why was I the one with the “reputation”?

And anyway, I wasn’t doing anything Dean wasn’t doing! In fact, he was worse than me. How come he had a reputation as a good hunter and people said I was…

“What the hell did you call me?” I asked, finally finding the words to speak.

“I didn’t call you anything,” he said, defensively. “I’m just sayin’…”

“Sam?” I asked. “Do people really say that about me?”

Sam didn’t need to answer me. It was all there in the way his face contorted as he tried not to frown.

“ _Some_ people,” he said. “Ellie, it’s not…”

“We’ve been made,” Dean said.

I had totally forgotten we were supposed to be staking out a house. Apparently, Dean had remembered and he was still watching out the window. I peered out too, and saw that the victim, Peter, was yelling at us from the driveway. He was still on the safe side of his black security gate.

“Hey, you!!!” he yelled.

Sighing heavily, I got out of the car as the guys did. My personal crisis would have to wait. Maybe I was needy and self-obsessed, but not when there was a life in danger.

“What are you doing? You watching me?!” hollered Peter, as we hurried across the road towards him.

“Sir, calm down, please,” Sam called, using his most effective soothing voice. He probably had his sweet, harmless puppy face switched on too, but I couldn’t tell from behind him.

“You guys aren’t cops!” Peter called back. “Not dressed like that! Not in that crappy car!”

“Whoa, hey!” We had reached the driveway, and for a moment I was worried Sam and I would have to hold Dean back. “No need to get nasty.”

I pushed Dean out of the way, still mad at him, and approached the gate. “We’re undercover cops, Mr. Warren. We’re just keeping an eye out, because we’re concerned you might be in danger?”

He had not seen me before, and he looked me up and down. “From who?!”

“Please just settle down…” Sam began, but Peter had already started to run.

“Just stay away from me!” he yelled, sprinting for his car.

“Please, just let us…” I said, but Dean shouted over the top of me.

“We’re trying to help you, moron!”

It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Peter did not find Dean’s words reassuring. He hurried into his car and the tyres screeched as he turned it around on his wide driveway.

The three of us stood at the gate, temporarily at a loss. Perhaps we should all have run back to the Impala so we could chase him, but I was still holding out hope we could reason with him. Surely if I stayed put, he’d hold back from actually running me down. But then again, maybe not. He did seem pretty scared.

I was still considering this when the car stopped suddenly, in the middle of the drive. The engine cut out with a heavy shudder.

“That can’t be good,” said Dean.

I shook my head and yelled over my shoulder. “Get the salt gun!”

With his much longer legs, Sam was up and over the gate quicker than me, but I wasn’t too far behind. It was a hundred metre sprint across the yard.

I reached the car just a few seconds after Sam did. He was looking through the driver’s side window, shouting out to Peter. I ran past him to look through the windshield. Peter was slumped forward on the steering wheel; alive or dead, I couldn’t tell. He wasn’t alone.

A spirit was sitting in the passenger seat, looking right through the glass and into my face. Dripping wet, like he had just walked out of the ocean, he had the beginnings of a beard and dark hair that fell in wet strands around his shoulders. It was the eyes that got my attention. Cold and grey, with huge pupils, they stared into me like he was trying to see my soul.

He turned away from me and looked towards Sam, who was pulling at the door handle, desperate to get in, though it was obviously locked. I looked around me for something I could use to smash the windshield. As I did so, I saw Dean running up, a salt-round rifle in his hands. He had noticed the spirit, and began to aim towards the passenger-side window so he could shoot through.

I grabbed Sam and pulled him out of the way so that Dean could get a clean shot at the ghost without worrying about hitting his brother. I heard the glass smash as Sam fell back against me. I nearly went over backwards as his full bulk hit me, but he grabbed me around the waist to stop me falling.

By the time we were both upright, the wet ghost was gone and Dean had unlocked the car doors through the shattered window. I ripped open the door, grabbing hold of Peter so I could check him for a pulse.

He was dead.

 

* * *

 

On the drive home no one was talking except the radio. Apparently, a severe storm was headed right for us, and there was a lot of chatter about it. Dean was focused on the road, Sam was looking out the window and my head was in two places at once. I was mad at Dean for the “slutty” remark. I was mad that we hadn’t saved Peter Warren from his fate. I was mad at myself for possibly caring more about my personal problems than the life we’d just failed to protect.

Finally, Dean shut the radio off with a sigh. “Do you wanna say it or should I?”

“What?” Sam asked.

“You can’t save everybody, Sam.”

His brother’s response was dripping with the sass that covers deep pain. “Yeah, right. So what, you feel better now or what?”

“No, not really,” said Dean.

“Me neither,” Sam muttered, so faintly I could barely hear him.

Meanwhile, there I was, sitting behind them, unable to think how I could help. The issue wasn’t failing to save Peter. Sam had just taken that on as a sort of substitute. He felt like if he could save Peter, then maybe he could still save Dean. I could see that plain as day, but I had no idea what to say about it or how to make Sam feel better. Maybe later, when we were alone and Dean had gone to sleep, I might be able to reassure him. It was just his imagination that had equated saving Peter with saving Dean. They weren’t the same thing at all.

Dean sighed. “You gotta under…”

“It’s just lately, I feel like I can’t save anybody.”

My heart just about broke hearing him.

 

* * *

 

When we got back to the house, Dean basically dumped everything and disappeared upstairs. It was my turn to sleep on the bed and earlier I’d been pretty excited about it. I’d been sleeping on motel floors for two months. To get a night on an actual mattress seemed like luxury. But I was no longer feeling the thrill.

“You wanna take the bed?” I asked Sam.

He didn’t reply, and I turned around to see why. Dean had bought a bottle of whiskey the night before and only had two drinks. In the fifteen seconds I’d had my back turned, Sam had opened it and downed at least three fingers.

I should have stopped him. I should have reminded him not to binge while still on a case. I should have pointed out how much he was always concerned about Dean’s drinking. I should have told him to at least use a glass.

Instead, I flopped down on the sofa and held out my hand. “Share, please!”

He handed me the bottle as he collapsed next to me and I took a huge swig. The burn as it went down my throat was so unpleasant that it took over my whole body and mind, making me shudder violently. But it was so powerful that it blotted out everything else for a moment. Then it was gone, and all I had left was the after-burn and the knowledge of my bad reputation and that I was a shitty friend who couldn’t even say one sentence to make Sam feel better.

 “I’m sorry, Sam,” I said. Bracing myself, I took another big swig from the bottle.

Just for an instant or two, I knew nothing but burning and it was amazing.

Sam grabbed the bottle out of my hand. He sat still for a moment, holding it in front of him and just looking at it.

“Can we just talk about something else?” he asked, before taking another, much smaller swig.

The laugh that came out of me was so hard and bitter that I surprised myself. “Ha! Yeah, let’s talk about what a huge slut I am.”

Before I knew it, the bottle was thrust back at me. I didn’t even think before pouring it down my throat again. That’s what Dean had said. He’d actually used that word. I sipped from the bottle, a longer, slower burst of pain. It prolonged the buzzy, blank feeling. When I passed the bottle back to Sam, there were tears hanging on my eyelashes and I didn’t know if they were from the whiskey or from remembering the breathless pain in my gut the moment one of my only friends had called me that horrible name.

Taking the bottle back off me, Sam held it in both hands. “I’m sorry he said that. But it’s not… that’s not what we think.”

I scoffed. “Not what _you_ think, maybe!”

He shook his head. “So, about three or four months ago, we were on this vamp nest in Wisconsin. Met up with this trio of hunters. We finished off the nest and headed out to a bar. Got talking, usual hunter stuff. Best kills, funny stories, and all that. One of them was an older guy and he worked with Dad once.” He stopped to take another sip of whiskey, and apparently enjoyed it so much he took another straight after. “So then we started talking about other hunters, and everyone knows Bobby. So, everyone knows you.”

I snatched the bottle back off him. “Yeah. I heard. Everyone’s been here!” I gestured to myself, before downing another quick sip of the whiskey.

He took it out of my hands while I was still drinking. “Hey, slow down… I haven’t finished. They… uh… well, when your name came up… they said some pretty awful stuff. One of them said you and he… uh…” He was clearly uncomfortable and he just left that hanging there and moved on. “And then this other guy said some really gross stuff about what he would like to do, uh… Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to hit him cos Dean beat me to it.”

I stared at him. I was having trouble picturing it. Not dudes saying gross stuff about me. That was painfully easy to picture. But Dean starting a fight over the issue. That seemed unlikely even after I’d been hunting with him for two solid months. Before that, it had seemed like he thought I was just okay. He certainly liked me better than he had when we were kids. But I wouldn’t have said he liked me enough to get physical with someone.

“He must have been looking for a fight,” I said.

Sam shook his head. “No, they were getting on fine before that. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he definitely told them you were an actual person and they needed to watch their mouths.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. “Bouncer kicked us out before it got too far. I’m just saying… Dean doesn’t think you’re a…” Sweet Sam. Even a little bit tipsy, he wouldn’t say that word. “What he said. Actually, he likes girls who are a bit… direct.”

I tried to take the bottle again, but he pulled it away.

“Just a little!” I promised, and he gave it to me with a sigh.

We had another gulp each and then I thought to ask.

“Who were they?”

Sam looked uncomfortable but I had a right to know and he knew it. “You know Mike Perrelli?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, he wasn’t lying. He and I did have a night maybe two years back. I’m guessing the friend who wanted to do gross stuff to me was Harry Butler?”

Sam nodded.

“Probably would have gone there,” I admitted. “But now I won’t.”

Handing me back the whiskey bottle, Sam stood up and walked over to the table, where he’d left the lid from the bottle.

“Seriously, though?” I asked. “Mike Perrelli?”

Sam nodded as he came back across the room with the whiskey lid. “Sorry. It must feel awful that he’s telling people.”

He sat down next to me, and flipped the long metal lid around in his large hand. He had it upside down and he picked up the bottle again.

“He should keep his mouth shut,” I said. “Or I might talk about him too.”

Sam gave a slight smile as he started to pour whiskey into the lid like it was a shot glass. I leant in close to him and whispered in his ear. “His penis is tiny, Sam! _So_ tiny!”

His head tipped back as he laughed, and he couldn’t keep his hands steady. The lid full of whiskey tipped over and onto my thighs and a little sloshed out of the bottle, wetting Sam’s knee.

I picked up the lid and held it out so Sam could refill it. Whiskey was soaking into my jeans but I could barely feel it. When he’d stopped laughing at Mike’s miniscule assets (totally true, by the way and I no longer felt like being classy enough not to mention it), Sam poured some more out for me.

Before I could drink it, he held his hand out to stop me. He raised the open bottle a little and I realised we were going to toast. “What are we drinking to?”

“Dunno,” Sam said. “Getting drunk?”

“Yes!” I squeaked. Yes, that definitely sounded like something I could drink to. “To getting drunk!”

I clinked my tiny lid of whiskey against Sam’s bottle, and just managed to avoid spilling it on myself again.

 

* * *

 

Three hours later we had finished Dean’s whiskey, and also polished off all the beers in the house. Sam had achieved a state of pleasant, cheerful drunkenness, but we’d basically been going drink for drink. I was hammered.

“No! You’ll fall!” Sam called.

“S’okay! I’m numble!” I said, from my wobbly perch on the back of the sofa. Standing up straight, I could have touched the ceiling, but I had to stay a little crouched to keep from falling. “Everyone says so! I’m numble like a pixie!”

“You’re _nimble_ ,” Sam corrected, reaching up to pull me back. “And not when you’re drunk. Get down.”

“Nimble,” I slurred. I had a sudden irritated thought. Our conversation had covered many subjects, including, once Sam was loosened up enough to forget how polite he was, the exact nature of the things that had been said about me in the bar that night. “Did Mike say I was _nimble_?” I asked. “When he was talking about what a good time I am?”

I had straightened up somewhat, my body forced upwards by the power of pure indignation. That was a mistake, and I realised it immediately. There was that instant of terrible clarity that comes right before you fall. It always feels like much longer than it is as time seems to stop, prolonging the last few moments before the possible pain of cracking your head open on a coffee table.

But the moment never came, as I felt an arm around my waist. Sam had caught me just as I slipped. He was on his knees, and because he had not been expecting me to be falling when he grabbed me, he was thrown off balance too and for the second time that night, we started falling together. I ended up flat on the sofa, with Sam partially on top of me. He had one leg and palm on the floor, and the other arm and leg tangled up with mine.

His position was so awkward that he started laughing and I laughed because I was very drunk, and the sound of someone else’s laughter was enough to set me off into peals of snorty giggling. Unable to hold himself up, Sam sank down onto the floor, where he lay for about thirty seconds, still laughing.

Finally, he picked himself up. I was still giggling on the sofa, but that wasn’t a problem for him. He just lifted up my legs up, sat down and lowered them again, so my feet and shins were on his lap. The whole process was hilarious to me for some reason, and I just laughed even harder, alternating my usual squeaky laughter with drunken snorts. I must have sounded like a pig. Super attractive, Ellie.

Lying on my back looking up at Sam, I was still giggling, but not as consistently. Staring at the perfect pinkness of his lips under his beautiful and angular nose, I trailed off into occasional squeaks. His shiny brown hair had the cutest little flip to it, and his long fringe framed his face, drawing me in to his sparkling eyes. Very soon, I wasn’t giggling at all. I was staring, transfixed at his eyes. The unique blend of colour in his irises. Was it brown or green? Was it hazel? Was it yellow? It was all three; I could see expanding supernovas in his eyes.

“What?” he asked, looking down at me with a confused smile.

And that was it. I was done. Because that’s when the dimples appeared. Those deep crevices on either side of his mouth. One was just a fraction deeper than the other, and they both curved around like little half-moons, accentuating his cheek bones. I tried to sit up, reaching towards his face. Nothing in the world was more important right then. I had to touch his perfect face. I had to!

Though he was confused about what I was doing, he could obviously tell I was trying to sit up and he grabbed my hands to pull me. I shifted my legs off his lap and folded them under me as I sat upright. It was a good thing I’d had a second to rethink. I couldn’t just grab his dimples like that. I needed to be a little smoother about it. But I was drunk and I didn’t know what smooth was.

“Sam! Sam… Sam!” I said, pulling his arm until he turned his torso to face me. He was still smiling at me, his gorgeous straight teeth showing as he grinned at my whiskey-fuelled gesturing. “Sam! Remember how I said I’d never sleep with another hunter again?”

“Yeah,” he said.

He was so much taller than me. I tried to get up to his ear height again so I could whisper, but I just couldn’t wait that long. I ended up telling his cheek. I whispered conspirationally to his left dimple (my favourite dimple).

“I didn’t mean you, Sam…”

This flustered him so much that he only got cuter. His dimples deepened so far I could have put my entire nose inside them. I kind of wanted to. A bright pink came over his cheeks.

If only he’d said “I am not interested in having sex with you, Ellie” or “That’s something we should talk about when you’re sober” or even just pushed me over. That would have been better.

Instead, he said, very softly “Uh… Thanks?”

I was too drunk to hear the question mark. I was hurting way deeper than any amount of whiskey could heal. He was being nice to me and in my drunk haze that meant he liked me and I was maybe even good enough and oh God, he was so beautiful!

My lips got within a centimetre of his before he realised what was happening. He didn’t shove me away or leap up in terror. He just leant back far enough that I couldn’t kiss him immediately. When I tried to move closer, he put one hand firmly on each of my shoulders. It was firm, but he wasn’t pushing me, just holding me a safe distance away from him.

“Ellie... uh… you’re very drunk.”

All I heard was _Do not kiss me, you insane, needy drunk_. But why didn’t he want to kiss me? He had heard the gossip about me, so he had to know I was good in bed. It wasn’t that he didn’t like me, because we’d been friends for so long. Was he worried it would be weird and mess with our friendship?

“It’s okay,” I said, still trying to lean closer to him. I was a little too out of it to understand that he was holding me back, and thought if I just tried hard enough, I would get to him somehow. “We can just pretend we didn’t…”

“Okay,” Sam said, letting go of me and standing up. For one brief, perfect moment, I thought he meant _Okay, I will have sex with you_. But he didn’t. “Come on, you’re going to bed.”

He helped me get to my feet, and I wobbled dramatically. It felt like I was moving metres from side to side as he walked with me to the stairs, but it was probably only a few centimetres. It was hard to focus on walking when I was worried about the kissing issue. Sam didn’t want to kiss me. That was the thought foremost at the front of my mind. I wondered if I could convince him to take me up to Dean’s room. Dean would want to kiss me. Dean’s dimples weren’t as good as Sam’s but he slept without a shirt on, so I could probably rub my face on his pecs.

I didn’t notice that I was supposed to be climbing the staircase until the stairs began hurtling towards my face. I threw my hands out quick enough to protect myself, and lowered my body down gently. Would it be okay to just fall asleep there on the stairs? I could sleep there and avoid having to climb, avoid having to look at Sam and knowing he didn’t find me anything like as beautiful as I found him. That second part was very appealing, and so I began to just curl up on the stairs.

Next thing I knew, he was lifting me up, one arm under my bent knees and the other holding my back. Although I was glad not to have to walk up the stairs myself, it did put me in the horrible position of having to look up at his face again. There were no dimples now, but there was his sweet little nose, and those eyes. I nearly burst into tears at how beautiful his supernova eyes were.

It probably didn’t take him long to get me up one flight of stairs and into the bedroom, but it felt like forever as I lay there with my head swimming in whiskey and the memory of a dream I once had about Sam’s pink lips. Eventually, I was placed gently down on the mattress, and that brought me back to reality. I was not kissing my friend, I never had, and I never would.

“M’sorry, Sam…” I whispered, reaching out for his hand.

He smiled as he grabbed the blanket from where Dean had kicked it off that morning. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just get some sleep.”

I was trying to sit back up again, my urgent desire to kiss him replaced by an urgent desire to apologise for it. “No! S’not okay! Shouldn’t try ‘n kiss friends! M’sorry!”

“I forgive you,” he said, pushing me back down as he put the blanket over me.

“Jus’… jus’… you looked so pretty, Sam!” The dimples were back as he smiled at that. I’d been there when he was called “gorgeous”, “handsome” and “sexy as hell” but maybe he wasn’t called pretty that often. “But ‘sokay. You don’t have to kiss me!”

I was agitated, trying to get him to understand what I was saying. I might as well have slurred random selections of words. It could have been more coherent. Sam sat down next to me, gently pushing on my shoulder again as I tried to get up. It was enough to keep me down.

“It doesn’t matter, Ellie. Get some sleep, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

I waved my other hand in his general direction, half throwing off the blanket as I lifted it. “Nah! S’alright! You don’t wanna kiss me and s’fine! Not pretty like you!”

Sam sighed and gathered the blanket back up, laying it over me again. “Of course you’re pretty.” As his hand moved past my face, he stopped to brush some of my hair away from my cheek. I almost stopped breathing at the feel of his huge calloused fingers against my skin. “Even when you’re super drunk.”

He thought I was pretty. I had all but forgotten Dean and his magnificent pecs existed. My undying crush on Kate Winslet was not relevant. In that moment, there was nothing in the world but Sam. He was the most beautiful person who had ever existed; he had a perfect nose and supernova eyes. And he said I was pretty.

That’s when it became apparent why he’d moved my hair. He bent down a little lower and kissed me on the cheek. He did what I always did, his lips brushing against my face for a single perfect instant. I closed my eyes and let myself feel the sensation. I had never been on the receiving end of one of my own cheek kisses before, but they always seemed to make people smile, and now I had some idea why. It was as light as a snowflake falling down onto my skin, and then it was gone, with nothing but a cold feeling as it melted quickly away.

Then Sam was gone and I managed to avoid crying myself to sleep. Drunk and emotional as I was, it was okay. Sam Winchester had said I was pretty, and allowed his perfect soft pink lips to touch my face.

My dreams were nice. Very nice.


	41. Chapter 40: Fancy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is not feeling so good in the morning. Then, just as she’s feeling better, Bela visits.

“WAKEY WAKEY PRINCESS!!!”

I groaned at the pain of someone shouting into my ear, and then I groaned from the pain of my own groaning. My damn toenails hurt. My eyelids were made of sandpaper and they scratched along my poor delicate eyeballs as I forced them open.

“So, I hear you owe me a bottle of whiskey…”

Dean was beside me. He was lying on his side, right up close to me, as he grinned into my face. His teeth seemed to be glowing in the dim light. At least he couldn’t open the curtains, since the house was meant to be empty.

“Sam drank it too,” I muttered, reaching for the blanket so I could pull it over my face.

He was quicker than me, and he whipped the blanket away from me before I could get it, flinging it across the room. “Oh, so you’re leading my brother into trouble too, huh?”

“He started it!”

“Sure he did.” He got up and off the bed, then grabbed my arm and started to pull. I slid across the mattress, desperately scrabbling to stay, but he was too strong. “Aw, your head hurts? You wanna stay in bed? Did someone have too much of  _my_  booze?”

“Deaaan!” I moaned as he pulled me off the bed and I collapsed onto the floor. My aching legs were made of squishy jelly. I couldn’t be expected to stand on them.

He bent down, put his hands under my armpits and pulled me straight up with no warning, still grinning into my face. “It’s research time, Ellie! We’ve got a ghost ship to ID today. You love research and ghost ships!!! You’re gonna have the best day ever!”

I was only standing upright because he was still holding on to me. I knew he was mocking me, turning my own cheerful attitude towards hard work against me. I just didn’t care. I needed somebody to lean against so I wouldn’t have to focus on the delicate problem of using my legs. Before too long, he let go of me, and I found myself upright under my own steam. Everything ached, especially my head, but I was definitely doing alright. I may have felt like I was dying. I may even have wished for it. But I was definitely alive.

“Attagirl,” Dean said. “And guess what? I figured out how to turn the water main on. Should be enough hot water for you to have a shower.”

A shower? Hot water? That sounded like actual Heaven. “Oh my God, yes. You’re the best,” I whispered. Dean’s voice was echoing in my head enough already. I didn’t need to raise my own voice and feel it bounce all over my skull.

“I am,” he grinned. “So hurry up. Wash off the shame and get downstairs. I’m headed out to get grease. Sam’s been curled around the toilet bowl for half an hour.”

At least Sam had been sick too. He’d been the one who’d opened the bottle. I never would have gotten that drunk on my own. Plus he’d encouraged me to go drink for drink with him, which was hardly fair when I was regular sized and he was eight foot tall or whatever.

“Sam…” I muttered. “I hope he feels rotten.”

Dean chuckled. “Always such a sweetheart, Ellie. Go get your ass in the shower. I’ll be back in twenty.”

The first five minutes I just sat under the stream of hot water, rubbing my eyes. Then I was sick. Fortunately it all went straight down the drain. That was usually how a hangover went for me. One quick up-chuck as my system gave up on processing it all and just rejected everything. Then I’d feel about fifty-percent better. I was able to take a proper shower, even wash my hair a little, though it was all in slow motion and with a nasty headache.

As the water washed over me, it took some of the pain and confusion with it. I managed to get with it enough to step out of the shower and put my jeans on very carefully, terrified that I’d fall over if I didn’t concentrate. It was possible that I was still slightly drunk.

I put on a tank top and threw one of my old plaids on over the top. It was not a day for looking good. My hair would take so long to sort out that I’d have to get the brush and do it downstairs. I hung the towel up and gathered up the shirt I’d slept in so I could put them away neatly. I took it with me into the bedroom. I turned it inside out before I folded it, so I’d recognise it was dirty. I put it back into my bag. I turned around, I looked at the bed.

And I had a horrifying flashback.

“Oh My God,” I said.

Did I kiss Sam? Did I babble about how pretty he was? Jesus, did we have sex? I definitely had a sex dream about Sam, but I couldn’t quite remember where the dream had started. There was definitely some stuff before the dream, stuff I’d actually done. I sat down heavily on the bed. I had to stop and think it through before I went downstairs. Sam was going to be down there, and remembering what had actually passed between us seemed like something I should do.

I was pretty confident none of the sex had been real. If it had been, Dean would surely have heard it through the thin walls of the house. Because… well… I won’t go into detail about it, but if that had been real it would have woken half the neighbourhood. If Dean had heard it, there’s no way he wouldn’t tease me about it, so that had to have been a dream.

No sex. That was a relief. I imagined it would be a very pleasant experience, but I didn’t want the complications that would surely come with it. Had I kissed him, though? No. That all seemed firmly part of the dream, as everything had been fairly fluid from the first kiss in the bedroom.

Then I remembered. I hadn’t kissed him because he hadn’t let me! Downstairs, on the sofa, I’d told him he was exempt from my “no more sleeping with hunters” rule and then I’d tried to kiss him but he pushed me off. Thank God! It began to come back clearer. He’d said no; that I was too drunk and then he’d carried me upstairs because I fell over.

He’d also said something about me being pretty and then he’d kissed my cheek, maybe? That was something I could unpack later, and decide how I felt about it. In the meantime, I hadn’t done anything awkward with my friend and that was a positive. Being careful not to stand up too quickly, I grabbed my hairbrush and then made my way down the stairs.

I went into the living room of the abandoned house, trying to brush my hair and walk at the same time. Sam was lying on the sofa, his arm over his eyes. He didn’t look up as I came in, so I had an extra few seconds to decide how I was going to play the whole thing. I could pretend not to remember. But that seemed like the kind of lie I’d eventually forget to keep. Besides which, there was something I wanted to tell him.

“Good morning,” I said, surprised I was even able to get the words out coherently. Ideally, I’d have liked to give him a cheerful, upbeat greeting to indicate everything was fine, but since we were both hungover that was probably a bit much.

He lifted his arm off his face as I came over. “Oh… hi.” He stared at me standing over him, brushing the tangles out of my hair. It’s not often that Sam Winchester has to look up at a person. After a few seconds, he remembered that he had impeccable manners, and shifted his legs so I could sit next to him on the sofa.

“We’ll be okay,” I said, lowering myself down carefully, rather than flopping the way I usually did. My head couldn’t handle quick movements. “Pretty decent of Dean to get us food, really, since we drank his booze.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. There was a pause. “Kind of disconcerting, actually.”

I laughed for a moment, before I discovered that laughing was painful. I went back to brushing my hair, figuring that would make the next thing I said seem super casual and not like something I’d rehearsed all the way down the stairs.

“So… I know you remember, and I remember, so let’s not make a big deal about it or whatever. But thanks.”

“What for?” he asked. “Not letting you kiss me? You were so drunk, Ellie, that wouldn’t have been right.”

Of course, it was entirely possible that the fact I was drunk had nothing to do with it, and that Sam would have pushed me away even if I’d been dead sober. In any case, it wasn’t just that. “It’s not just telling me no, it was the way you did it. You let me keep some dignity. So thanks.”

“Oh… uh… sure,” he said.

Thank God the door opened, because I didn’t know quite what to say after that. Despite my best efforts it had got kind of awkward. Dean was there to save the day, however. He threw the door open, entering the house with a holler of “Breakfast!” that made Sam and I wince in perfect unison.

There was at least one thing we could be thankful for. Dean did not know anything about the incident. I could already imagine the hours of mockery we would both endure if he did. I wondered if perhaps it would be worth telling him. Dean would probably find a way to save himself from his imminent death if it meant the satisfaction of making “Sammy’s Little Girlfriend” jokes for the rest of eternity.

* * *

My breakfast burrito perked me up considerably. Plus, with the water in the house working, I was able to stay hydrated and that made a big difference. We were all trying to identify the ghost ship. We had the description from Peter, but an awful lot of candidates to go through. Dean had checked a bunch of books about shipwrecks out of the library and we spent the morning going through them.

I fell asleep around about noon, but when I woke up again a couple of hours later, I felt pretty much normal. Sam had gotten over the worst of it too, and by the time three o’clock rolled around, we both had actual colour in our cheeks and could talk at a normal volume without hurting ourselves.

There was a knock on the door that startled all three of us. No one knew where we were and the house was supposed to be shut up. It was some kind of holiday home, we figured, but there was so little furniture, it was almost abandoned. Someone was going to get a shock when they found themselves with a water bill.

Dean had been scrolling through websites on his phone, but he put it down quick and grabbed his gun. Sam grabbed a gun too, but that was so not my style, so I just followed behind them to the hall. It was probably just people collecting for charity or something. No need to bring bullets into it.

Dean swung open the little cover over the peephole and looked through. His body language immediately switched from stiff and alert to loose. He rolled his eyes as he lowered his gun.  _Bela_ , he mouthed.

I groaned and went back to sit on the sofa again.

I heard the door opening as Sam came back over to sit next to me. Then there was Bela’s voice.

“Dear God. Are you actually squatting? Charming.”

The heavy slam of the door indicated that Dean had enough of her already. He stalked back to his own chair, leaving her to follow him or not. She did, and I could hear her entering the living room behind me.

“So how’d things go last night with Peter?”

I picked up my book again. I may have been feeling mostly better, but I was way too tired and hungover to deal with Bela’s bullshit. Sam and Dean didn’t give any answer either.

“That well, huh?”

Dean was looking at her with murder eyes. “If you say  _I told you so_ , I swear to God, I’ll start swinging.”

Bela sighed. “Look, I think the three of us should have a heart-to-heart.”

I cleared my throat, but she didn’t even look at me. It was obvious that when she said “three of us”, I was the one she was missing out.

“That’s assuming you have a heart,” said Dean.

“Dean, please. I’m sorry about what I said before, okay? I come bearing gifts.”

“Better be a damn pony,” I muttered, and distinctly saw Dean smile out of the corner of my eye.

“I’ve ID’d the ship,” she said. She was looking at me then, smiling smugly at me over the top of my book.

I threw it down, irritated that Bela had managed to do what we’d spent a hungover morning struggling with. When she pulled out a picture of the  _Espirito Santo_ , I had to admit that it did exactly match the description we had. I hadn’t seen it in any of my research, so at least I hadn’t messed up. I could have figured it out too, if I’d seen the right page of the right book.

“In 1859, a sailor was accused of treason,” she said. “He was tried aboard ship in a kangaroo court and hanged. He was thirty seven.”

“That would explain the thirty-seven year cycle,” Sam said.

“Aren’t you a sharp tack?” Bela replied, super freaking patronising. “There’s a photo of him somewhere…” she began flipping through the papers she was holding. “Here.”

She passed the photo to Sam and I saw his eyebrows go up. “That’s him, right?” he asked, handing the photo to me. It was a picture of the deck of the ship. The Captain was in it, leaning on the wheel thing they used to steer with. But in the foreground, there was a familiar man. He was a lot neater than our spirit from the night before, hair tied back and a clean looking coat that must have been a kind of uniform. His face was unmistakeable, though. He’d been quite a handsome man while he was alive.

“Yeah. That’s the guy,” I said, as I passed the photo on to Dean.

“You saw him?” Bela asked, more to Dean than to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Only, our guy was missing a hand,” Dean noted. He was right. I hadn’t really taken that in at the time, but he was definitely missing his right hand.

“His right hand?” Bela guessed and I stared at her.

“How did you know?”

“The sailor’s body was cremated,” she said. “But not before they cut off his hand to make a Hand of Glory.” There was a sort of smile on her face as she said it that made me suspect that Bela found the macabre concept of a Hand of Glory to be as cool as I did.

“A Hand of Glory?” Dean asked, with a chuckle. “I think I got one of those at the end of my Thai massage last week.”

Bela did not look amused.

“A Hand of Glory is an occult object,” I told him. “Made from the right hand of a hanged man. It’s supposed to be very powerful.”

For the first time since I’d met her, Bela looked directly at me without turning her nose up. She raised one eyebrow. “So they say,” she said.

“And officially counts as remains,” Dean said.

Sam was looking at the photo again. “But still, none of this explains why the ghost is choosing these victims.”

“I’ll tell you why. Who cares?” Bela asked. “Find the hand, burn it and stop the bloody thing.”

Something wasn’t right about all this. If Bela was so confident about finding the hand and putting an end to the killing, what exactly was she doing talking to us. She’d made it perfectly clear she wanted nothing whatsoever do with us. We were just grubby Hunters in cheap clothes.

“Well go on then,” I said. “Don’t let us keep you.”

“I know where the hand is,” she said, with a glare. “It’s at Sea Pines Museum. But it’s not exactly a one-woman job.”

“Oh, so now you need our help, we’re suddenly worth your time?”

“Yes,” she admitted. Well… you had to give her points for honesty!

* * *

I had my scowl all ready to go before I even opened the door. I had put up with some serious bullshit in my life, but for some reason, this relatively minor insult was making me furious. Ripping the door open, I was greeted by a further infuriating sight.

Bela looked amazing. She was wearing a tight black cocktail dress that showed off everything, and everything was well worth showing off. Her hair and make-up were simple and looked totally effortless, as if she was just naturally that smoky-eyed and sexy. Her necklace looked heavy, and it sparkled in the light from the candles in the hallway.

“He’s not ready,” I said, hoping pure willpower could break a person’s nose.

“Well, I’ll just come in and wait, shall I?” she said. It wasn’t really a question. She just waltzed across the landing and into the house.

I let go of the door, letting it slam shut as I pushed past Bela and towards the staircase. I muttered to myself as I stomped back up in my jeans and holey socks. At least I was comfortable.

Dean was still in the bedroom where I’d left him, glaring into the full length mirror. His bowtie was completely crooked and he didn’t have a jacket on yet.

“This is ridiculous, Ellie!” he barked. “No one is gonna buy that I belong at this thing.”

Seeing how frustrated and (he’d kill me for saying this) nervous Dean was softened me up a little bit. I stepped up closer to him and started undoing his bowtie. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just walk around like you belong. Confidence is key.”

He was looking down as I fixed up his collar and retied the bowtie.

“How come you know how to do that?” he asked. “Bobby wear a lot of tuxedos?”

I smiled. “Now and then, yeah. But that’s not where I learned it.” It didn’t hurt to have a little mystery about me. I figured I’d leave it up to Dean’s imagination where I’d developed the skill. He was bound to come up with something more interesting than the truth. A guy I dated for five months in college was a waiter at a fancy restaurant. Not exactly a thrilling backstory.

Once I’d got it nice and straight, I tidied up the collar again and then, instinctively smoothed Dean’s shirt down, running my hand all the way down his chest and stomach. I didn’t realise what I was doing until I felt his solid abs under the crisp white cotton. Trying not to blush, I just walked away casually, like that was a totally normal thing to do when helping a friend get dressed, and fetched the jacket off the bed.

I helped him on with the jacket. He looked good. Damn good. I’d helped sort Sam out earlier and it was definitely a struggle to judge who scrubbed up better. Those Winchester genes… Damn!

“What’s going on up there?!” called Bela.

“So not okay with this!” Dean hollered back. “Seriously, Ellie, do I pass for fancy?”

“You look fine,” I told him, totally truthfully. “Stop complaining. It’s an old fashioned heist. It’ll be fun.”

“It will not be fun,” he groaned, he was about to leave, but I grabbed his arm. The handkerchief in his pocket was all bunched up.

It sounded like fun to me, and I was probably pouting as I took out the handkerchief and began to fold it up properly. “Yeah,” I said. “Who’d wanna wear nice clothes and go to a fancy party? You’re definitely the one getting the bum deal, here.”

He smiled as I put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “You want me to take you to a fancy party, Princess?”

I did not feel like his teasing deserved any kind of response, so I just pushed him out the door and let him head downstairs on his own. I didn’t want to have to deal with Bela again. I just sat on the bed, ignoring the sounds of their voices, and waited until I heard the front door open and close.

There was no TV in the house, but I’d be okay. Let awful Bela and the stupid Winchesters enjoy their nice clothes and little trays of food on sticks. I had leftover burritos, a full bag of potato chips, a working bathtub and a brand new copy of  _Pride and Prejudice_  that Sam had bought me as a consolation prize.

I was still indignant as I turned on the taps in the bath. I’d be very good at fitting in to the rich charity auction crowd at the museum. I had good manners! I definitely wouldn’t look as good as Bela did, but that was hardly a fair standard, when she was smoking hot. But if someone gave me the money to buy a super nice dress, I could have found something. Maybe I was more comfortable in denim and flannel, but I liked wearing a pretty dress, from time to time. I liked putting on a little makeup and doing something with my nightmare hair for a few hours. It ain’t a crime to want to feel like I’m pretty. Or to want fancy food on sticks and free champagne.

But… taking a bath alone in the empty house was a pretty nice feeling too. I had time and I had space to myself, which was pretty exciting. Although, having time meant I finally had the opportunity to go over what had happened with Sam the night before. Me trying to kiss him was all very well, I’d processed that. He was a good looking guy, I’d been super drunk and kind of needy so I’d listened to the part of my brain that operated based on pure physical attraction. He had been real nice about it, it didn’t mean anything and there was nothing to talk about.

But after he’d taken me to bed, there was that moment where he said I was pretty even when drunk and then kissed me on the cheek. I spent at least a good half hour analysing that in every possible way, but in the end, I decided it was pretty meaningless. I kissed Sam’s cheek a lot and I thought  _he_  was pretty, even while drunk. So, we were on the same page, really. There was no reason to read anything more into it than that. It was such a relief that I added some extra hot water and settled myself down to soak some more.

Maybe I wasn’t allowed to go on a heist at a fancy party, which was probably the funnest thing in the whole world. But I had bathtub and some kind of fruity bubble soap that I got from the gas station. I could make my own fun.


	42. Chapter 41: Revenge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bela has shafted the Winchesters and sold the vengeful spirit's hand. But now she's the next victim and she needs their help. Luckily, Ellie has a small amount of sympathy and an idea.
> 
> (This is the last full chapter taking place during 3x06)

It was after eleven o’clock, but it wasn’t like I had anywhere to be in the morning, and anyway, I was waiting up for the boys and Bela to get back.

“No, Dad! They’re real good. I wasn’t feeling so great this morning and Dean went out to get me breakfast. Wasn’t that sweet?”

I could actually hear my father frowning through the phone. “Ain’t nothing sweet about Dean Winchester.”

I laughed. “Not if he thinks anyone’s looking. Hang on…” There was a heavy banging at the front door. “I think they’re back. I’ll call soon. Love you!”

“I love you too, kiddo.”

I hung up and threw my cell onto the sofa beside my book, then skipped over to the door quick. I’d had a pretty fun night and I’d stopped being so mad about not getting to go to the party. It wasn’t their fault Bela’s plan didn’t involve me, so why take it out on Sam and Dean?

I peeped through to make sure it was them. Side by side in matching tuxedos, they looked real spiffy. Bela was not with them, but Dean had a little package, so I assumed that was the Hand. I wondered why she hadn’t come back with them, but I was pretty happy about it as I opened the door.

“So you got it?” I asked, opening the door.

Dean scowled as he shoved the white cloth bundle into my hands. It felt a little small to be a hand, but I figured it could have shrivelled up. He nearly pushed me as he stomped his way into the house. Sam gave a slight shake of the head as he followed.

Letting the door shut of its own accord, I looked down at the little parcel again. It obviously was _not_ the Dead Man’s Hand they’d gone in search of. As Sam stomped up the stairs after his brother, I unwrapped it.

Inside there was a little ship in a bottle. It was a pretty thing, and clever the way they got it in there, but it was most certainly not what the guys had gone out for. If the heist had simply failed, they’d probably have come home empty handed. So… Bela must have done some kind of switch and screwed them. Figured.

I turned the little bottle over in my hands for a while, admiring it. I was still standing in the middle of the living room, wondering what to do with it, when Sam came back down the stairs. He had changed out of his tux and was back in his usual Hunter uniform of two shirts and jeans. There was a definite sigh from him as his ass hit the cushions. I went over and sat next to him, folding my bare feet up under me. I put the bottle down on the table in front of us.

“So… not a successful night?” I asked.

He sighed again. “I dunno, she must have switched it while Dean wasn’t looking.”

“Well, where were you?”

He shifted in his seat, frowning. “Uh… I was stuck with Gert.” The old lady had gotten the tickets for Bela and the boys, but her condition had been that Sam attend as her date. Poor thing must have been unable to get away from her.

“That’s a drag,” I said. “Did you at least get tiny food on sticks?”

Sam smiled. “It wasn’t on sticks. But it was pretty tiny.” I tried to imagine the sorts of little canapes they served at weddings and parties in Sam’s enormous hands. Or his mouth. He could have popped vol au vents like candy!

“And what about Gert? What on Earth did you talk about?”

He rubbed his hand across his face in obvious discomfort. “Oh, uh… not a lot. She was kinda handsy.”

Oh… wow. I’d have thought a lady of her age would have a little more manners. My daddy had always taught me about keeping my hands to myself, and I was at least sixty years younger. Sam saw me pulling a face, and his forehead crinkled.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah… she touched pretty much everything. You’re not laughing.”

I hadn’t realised it was a joke. Sam’s body language had certainly not suggested that. “Was it supposed to be funny?”

“No,” he said, still with a frown and that cute little confused crinkle. “But… Dean and Bela laughed.”

Maybe I was missing something, but it sure didn’t seem amusing to me. “Would you laugh at me if some old dude was feeling me up?”

“No!” he said, appalled at the suggestion.

“Well, what’s the difference?” I asked. I’d been touched when I didn’t want to be enough times to know it was awkward and unpleasant. At least I could slap drunks in bars. Sam couldn’t exactly slap an old lady.

As we both heard the sound of Dean’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, Sam only responded with a slight smile, and his dimples appeared just for a fraction of a second. Then we were focused on Dean, as he stomped into the room.

“What the Hell do we do now?” he asked, looking at the two of us as though it were our fault.

“Well… could we find Bela and get it back?” I asked.

“If she hasn’t already sold the damn thing!” Dean wasn’t exactly shouting, but he certainly wasn’t minding his volume.

“Would it… uh… does it help if I think I know what the victims had in common?” asked Sam.

Dean was pacing across the room, but he waved a hand, which I guessed meant _Yeah go ahead and tell us_.

“Well, Gert was telling me about the Warren brothers. Apparently there’s this rumour that they killed their father, inherited everything.”

“Just a rumour?” I asked.

Sam shrugged. “She said it like it was pretty common knowledge, but no one’s ever proved it. But get this. Sheila was in a car accident as a teen. She was driving when the car flipped. Killed her cousin.”

Dean stopped pacing and turned around. “So… you’re thinking all the victims were involved in someone else’s death?”

“A family member’s death.” Sam stood up and went over to the file Bela had left behind. He pulled out the old photo of our ghost and the ship’s captain. “Remember, our guy was hanged, and his own brother was the one who sentenced him.”

“Oh!” I bounced in my seat a little, excited to have even this minor lead. “Oh! He can’t get revenge on his brother, so he’s hitting people who’ve committed the same crime!”

“Well, the Warrens I get,” said Dean. “But sounds like Sheila’s cousin was just an accident.”

“When are vengeful spirits ever rational?” I asked, and Dean pulled a face that silently said _Good point_.

Trouble was, knowing the ghost’s motive didn’t really bring us any closer to stopping him. We didn’t know what Bela had done with his hand, so burning it would be difficult. Was there any chance of reasoning with him? Could we summon him to where we wanted him and find some other way to get him gone?

Dean had picked up the ship in a bottle and was holding it close to one of the candles for a better look. He wasn’t going to see anything helpful, but at least it focused his attention and stopped him pacing.

“You know what, you’re right,” he said. “I’m not gonna kill her. I think slow torture’s the way to go.”

Being mad about Bela wasn’t going to get us anywhere. She’d double-crossed us and that was just too bad. Revenge would have been nice, but our priority had to be stopping the ghost. “Dean, just calm down…” I started, but he turned on me like it was my fault.

“Calm down! I can’t calm down! I can’t believe she got another one over on us!”

“You,” said Sam.

I put my hand over my mouth as though that would stop Sam from speaking. He was right, of course. It wasn’t him that Bela had tricked, but that was hardly a helpful observation and bound to piss Dean off.

At least Dean stopped glaring at me. “What?”

Sam must have realised he was playing with fire, but he made his point anyway, with a stammer. “I… I mean she got… one over on you… not… us.”

Dean stared at him as if he couldn’t believe he’d have the audacity to point out the truth. “Thankyou Sam! Very helpful!”

Figuring it would be up to me to soothe things, I stood up and went over to Dean. “Well… I mean, it is kind of the point…” He was about to object so I hurried on quickly. “She kinda planned it that way. That’s why she didn’t want me there, made sure Sam was distracted by the creepy old lady. Seems like she didn’t just do the switcheroo on a whim.”

Dean gave a frown and a slight nod of the head to this, conceding that I was probably right. Bela had skilfully eliminated Sam and me as obstacles, meaning she only had Dean to contend with. And that dress she’d worn was probably designed to distract him, let’s be honest. It would have distracted me, that’s for sure.

Before Dean could answer me, there was a loud banging at the door. I looked to the boys, but they both shrugged, so I went over and peered through the peephole. It was Bela.

“Hello? Could you open up?” she called.

Dean looked like he was ready to load his gun, and Sam wasn’t too impressed either but I was kind of curious. Why would she show up after what she’d done? And was it just me or did she look kind of… scared?

Before either of the boys could stop me I opened the door.

“Just let me explain,” said Bela.

From behind me, there was a short sharp bark of a laugh from Dean and no sound at all from Sam. I turned around to look at them. As much as I wanted to know what had made Bela come back, it kind of seemed like a situation where we ought to slam the door on her. Giving her a chance to explain kind of suggested her behaviour was forgivable and it really wasn’t. She’d presumably taken the hand to sell for a profit and that meant more people were going to die. She’d used Sam and Dean to do it. On the other hand, maybe she’d come to give the hand back.

I wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Dammit, Ellie just let her the hell in!” barked Dean, and so I stepped aside to let her through.

I shut the door after her and she made her own way into the next room, without invitation. She sat on the sofa. Dean was fast behind her and he leant over her in what was definitely a threatening way, while Sam and I stood by the fireplace where we could see her face properly.

With Dean bending close to her all menacing and Sam folding his arms and rocking his classic bitch-face, I figured I should look suitably scary too. It was kinda hard when I was in my pyjamas. They were pink and had happy owls on them. But my knife was on the table, so I picked it up and still looking straight at Bela, I spun it in my hand, totally confident I wouldn’t cut myself on the blade.

There was a long silence until she realised we obviously weren’t going to ask her any questions. She already knew what they were.

“I sold it,” she said. “I had a buyer lined up as soon as I knew it existed.”

This apparently irritated Dean so much that he couldn’t even be near her any more. He straightened up and strode away towards the other end of the room, but not before miming shooting her to me and Sam.

“So why’d you make Sam and Dean go to the charity ball?” I asked. “What did you need them for?”

“I needed a cover. You were convenient.”

Sam nodded, like he suspected this all along. He had gone through an appalling evening just so Bela could make money. Even he couldn’t be sympathetic under the circumstances. “Look, you sold it to a buyer, just go buy it back.”

“It’s halfway across the ocean. I can’t get it back in time,” she said.

I was about to say she shouldn’t have freakin’ sold it then, but Dean noticed something I didn’t.

“In time for what?” he asked.

Bela looked down at her feet. I figured it had to take a lot for someone like her to feel guilty. She had shot Sam in the shoulder without giving it a second thought. Maybe that wasn’t guilt? Fear, perhaps?

“What do you want?” I asked. “Why would you even come to us after what you did?”

“Yeah, what’s with you?” Sam was staring at her intently. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I saw the ship,” she said.

That explained it. She’d gone ahead and sold the hand and then she’d seen the ship, so now she needed our help to stop the spirit coming for her.

“You what?” asked Dean. The shape of his mouth was technically a smile, but that word is too friendly for what he was doing. As he walked back towards the sofa, he had a disbelieving sort of chuckle to his voice. “Wow. You know, I knew you were an immoral thieving con artist bitch, but just when I thought my opinion of you couldn’t get any lower…”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“We figured out the spirit’s motive,” said Sam, holding up a photograph to show her. “This is the captain of our ship. The one who hung our ghost boy.”

Bela looked at the photo. “So?”

“So,” I said, putting down my knife. “Our ghost was killed by his own brother. Turns out he’s got a pretty specific choice of victim. People who killed a member of their own family…”

Bela was still looking down at the picture, but it didn’t seem like she was seeing it at all. In fact, her eyes flickered as though she was recalling something, realising how what I was saying applied to her. She had killed a member of her family and now the spirit was coming for her.

“Sheila had a car accident, killed her cousin.  The Warren boys offed their daddy for the inheritance.”

Bela spoke only just above a whisper, more to herself than to any of us. “Oh my God.”

“So who was it, Bela?” Dean asked, coming in close to her again. The way he leaned over her was very menacing, and if it had been me, I’d have been terrified. “Who’d you kill? Was it Daddy? Your little sis, maybe?”

“It’s none of your business,” Bela said, with none of her usual confidence.

Maybe there was something wrong with me, but I just couldn’t get behind the way Dean was talking to her, an unspoken threat in his eyes and the way he loomed over her. Sam was looking down at her with a face like the one my father had when he was “not angry, just disappointed”.

But… well, we weren’t saying Sheila deserved to die, were we? How did we know Bela’s story wasn’t similar? Even knowing what the Warrens had done we would still have tried to save them. We always tried to help people. Our job was to save people, not pass judgement on who got to live and who didn’t.

“Well, have a nice life, you know, whatever’s left of it,” Dean said, picking up his jacket like he was about to leave.

“Dean!” I hissed, and he turned around.

“What? You think we should help her? We’re a bunch of serial killers, remember? What good can we do?”

“Okay… that was a bit harsh, I admit it, but I doesn’t warrant a death sentence.” Her tone lacked confidence and its usual air of derision. This was probably as near as she came to begging.

“That’s not why you’re gonna die,” Sam reminded her. “What’d you do, Bela?”

Maybe deciding I was the weak link, Bela turned to me. “You wouldn’t understand. No one did. Never mind, I’ll just do what I’ve always done. I’ll deal with it myself.”

She was making for the door, but I couldn’t let her go. Not when an idea had occurred to me, something that would save her life and get rid of the spirit for good too.

“Wait!” I called, grabbing her arm. She turned quickly, and looked at me, enough fight left in her to be insulted that I’d touched her. She probably didn’t want to catch cowgirl stripper. “I think there might be a way to stop the ghost. For good. Without burning the hand.”

“Well, how about that, Bela! You might get lucky. But there’s no rush, Ellie. Take your time.”

“We need Bela!” I insisted. “We need her help. Sam… does that file say where the Captain is buried?”

 

* * *

 

We were out in a cemetery, middle of the night and a heavy storm was coming through. I vaguely recalled hearing warnings about it on the radio. It was supposed to be dangerous and we should all have been inside, taking proper storm precautions. Instead, there I was, wearing my warmest clothes and a spare jacket of Sam’s, drawing a pentagram and trying to keep all the candles lit. Sam was helping me set up for the ritual, while Dean stayed with Bela, armed with a salt rifle. If the spirit showed up too early to kill her, the plan wasn’t going to work.

Of course, it probably wouldn’t work anyway, but no one else had come up with anything better.

A particularly loud burst of thunder and a gust of wind and one of my candles blew out. Sam ran to fix it for me, while Dean yelled. “Ellie! Get on with it!!!”

I had the ritual in a John Winchester’s notebook, but it was pretty hard to read while I was being pelted with horizontal rain. I squinted at the lettering before giving it my best shot. I spoke the best Latin, so it made sense for me to do it. Just focusing on the reading, it was hard to tell exactly what was going on around me, but there were definite shouts from Bela.

I’d made it about halfway through the incantation before I heard Dean yelling at me. He was always yelling at me. “Hurry up, Ellie!!!”

It wasn’t like I was doing it slow on purpose. I was almost being blown over in the wind and I couldn’t see further than a few inches from my own nose. He was probably panicked, but all the same, I was doing the best that I could. I pulled the book up closer, hoping I could maybe use it to shield my face from the rain a little.

When I’d made it through the final part of the incantation, there was a loud cracking sound. The spirit I had summoned, the ship’s Captain, and our vengeful spirit’s brother, appeared in the centre of my pentagram. I couldn’t tell what caused it, whether it was the power of the magic I’d just performed, or the wind or maybe the Captain’s ghost, angry with me for summoning him. Either way, a powerful force knocked me backwards a few feet. I landed against a tombstone, hitting with the whole left side of my body. It was painful, but I was able to look up in time to see that our original spirit was no longer focused on Bela, but on his brother’s ghost.

“I’m sorry,” the Captain said.

“Your own brother!” growled the vengeful ghost.

“I’m so sorry!” the Captain repeated.

I guessed sorry wasn’t good enough, as his brother charged at him. The two spirits collided with a splash and what sounded like screams, and then there was nothing. Not even the storm. I managed to get myself to sit upright, but I had to hold on to my ribs as I did. I’d probably be bruised pretty bad there on the left side.

Leaning against the tombstone, I could see Bela was kneeling on the ground. She seemed okay. She was definitely alive, but she was breathing heavily. The ghost must have started to drown her. But now he had the revenge he really wanted, and he had left her alone. Sam and Dean were running towards me from different directions and they reached me at the same time.

“Ellie!” Sam called, getting down to look at me. “Hey, are you okay?”

“What happened?” asked Dean, as he also crouched down to my level.

I waved them away. “I’m fine. Just sore. Is Bela okay?”

“It was close, but you did it,” said Sam. “Nice idea. Giving him what he really wanted.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty genius. Didn’t think it’d actually work. Ow. Help.”

Getting to my feet proved to be a little difficult on my own, but I managed it with help. Dean came with me back to the car while Sam went to check up on Bela. The case seemed basically over, and there was nothing left to do but put something soothing on my torso and get away from Bela as quickly as possible.

 

* * *

 

Sam thought my ribs weren’t cracked and I so I had to suck it up and pitch in as usual. Packing the next morning was painful, as I kept having to bend down to pick things up, and carrying my heavy duffle down the stairs was not easy. Sam would have been happy to do everything for me, but neither of the boys complained when they were sore, so I wasn’t going to either. If I wanted them to treat me like a tough, capable hunter, I had to pretend like pain didn’t exist.

“Ellie, fold these!” Dean yelled, throwing the two spare blankets at me. Reaching up to catch them, I was prepared for the pain and I managed not to wince.

“Charming,” said a cheerful English voice from behind us. “At least say please.”

I just shrugged and started folding the first blanket. I knew better than to expect pleases and thankyous from Dean.

“You should lock you doors,” Bela went on. “Anyone could just barge in.”

“Anyone did,” said Sam, as he stuffed something into his bag. “Did you come to say goodbye or thankyou?”

“I’ve come to settle affairs,” she said, reaching into her purse. “Here!” She tossed something at each of the boys. I looked over to see what it was as Dean caught it. It was a wad of cash, all bound up in paper, fresh from the bank.

“Five thousand each ought to cover it, don’t you think.”

Sam was looking at the money in his hands, up at Bela, back at the money. I didn’t blame him. Five thousand dollars was more than I’d ever seen in my life. Even abstractly, as a number in my bank account, I’d never had that much. Figured she’d only pay Sam and Dean, though, despite the whole plan being mine, plus I was the one who performed the incantation and got knocked into a tombstone. Maybe if I’d had an ass as good as theirs she’d have paid me.

“I don’t like being in anyone’s debt,” said Bela.

“So ponying up ten grand is easier for you than a simple thankyou? You’re so damaged,” said Dean.

She just gave him her patronising smile. “Takes one to know one. Lovely seeing you boys.”

She turned and it seemed she was about to leave, but I couldn’t take it anymore. Not even a thankyou? How about an acknowledgment of who had come up with the whole rescue plan in the first place?

“Um…” I said, outraged, but not confident about it.

Bela smiled. “Oh, don’t pout. You get double.” Reaching into her purse, she came over to me and I dropped the blanket as she thrust two wads of cash into my hands. “I hope you boys noticed she did all the actual work, because I did.”

I stared at the money. It was all in fifties, and it felt so heavy, so much paper in one handful.

“I don’t like you.” Bela said, and that was evident from the way her nose turned up at standing near me. “But what I like even less is the way men talk about women like us. So, I’m sorry. About the cowgirl stripper remark. And for implying certain rumours about you are true, or that you wouldn’t deserve respect if they were.”

I had been astonished by the money, but to hear Bela apologise and admit to being in the wrong was beyond anything I would ever have expected. “Oh… Um… thankyou.”

Dean sniggered. “See, Bela. She said thankyou. It’s that easy.”

Bela didn’t even look at him. “Shut up.” Then she focused her attention back on me. “As for you, a little advice. You know why I don’t like you? Apart from your denim and your voice and your self-righteous attitude?” Why did everyone always pick on my voice!? “You’re nice. In a sickening _Little Women_ sort of way. When you try to be rude, I’m honestly embarrassed for you.”

There’s nothing wrong with being nice to people! And I wasn’t sickeningly nice, either. I could be very mean when I wanted to be. Just because I wasn’t mean for the sake of it the way she was. “I…”

“Don’t argue. Any normal person would have these two Neanderthals eating out of her hand by now, but you’re letting them boss you around? I know you’re not stupid, and I don’t think you’re in love with either of them, so why do you follow them around like a lost puppy? You could make them do anything you like, you know?”

I scowled at her. “Decent people don’t manipulate their friends.”

“If you say so, Denim. I’m just pointing out that if you don’t want people to walk all over you, you might try not lying down in front of them.” She turned away from me then, apparently done with me and my clothes and my voice.

But I was not done. I didn’t let anyone boss me around! Did I? “I don’t!”

“Of course you don’t,” she said over her shoulder. She was counting out of another cash packet, as she walked to Dean. “Here boys, have another thousand. One of you put on your least cheap suit and take her to an expensive restaurant. Somewhere with table cloths. And don’t embarrass her. Chew your food. Ciao!”

On her way out, she had to pass me one more time. She stopped, looked me up and down and then pulled another bill out of the pile. She took a step to get close enough to me and handed me a crisp hundred. “Here. For God’s sake get your eyebrows plucked.”

Then she left, her heels clacking on the path outside. Dean was looking pretty pleased with his wad of cash, while Sam was still staring at the door. I was, as usual, preoccupied on one irrelevant detail.

 “What’s wrong with my eyebrows?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry Sam!!! I love it when you're super clever and think outside the box and basically kick ass with your super hot mega sexy brain. But, I needed Ellie to do something that would prove how indispensable she is to the team, so I could integrate her into the show more completely. Sorry you had to be the victim of that, Sam. I'll have her replace Dean for some impressive feat later, even it out a bit. Don't hate me Sam, I still love you!!! Also, please note I had Ellie stand up for your right not to be groped in the name of comedy. That shit is not cool.


	43. Chapter 42: Best Day Ever!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean insists on going to Atlantic City, but Ellie is worried she won't enjoy it. Then, she has possibly the Best Day Ever, and she hasn't even got to the end yet.
> 
> The first part is the final scene of 3x06, the rest is set between 3x06 and 3x07.

My attempts to fold the map were so inept that I ended up with a thick wad of semi-folded paper. I couldn’t make it fold back along the lines again.

“If you weren’t so scared of the turnpike we wouldn’t have this problem…” I muttered, tempted to just ball the whole thing up and toss it at the back of Dean’s head.

“My baby doesn’t like sitting in traffic. She needs the open road.”

“She needs to turn off this highway before we hit Philadelphia,” I said, tapping Sam on the shoulder. “Please!?” I begged, holding out the half-folded mess of a map to him.

He took it off me and began unfolding it so he could fix it, trying to avoid flinging his arms into Dean’s head.

“Seriously, Atlantic City?” he asked.

“Hell yeah!” said Dean. “Play some roulette. Always bet on black!”

I had never been to a casino, and I didn’t really know if it would be my thing. I’d never had so much money before and the idea of blowing it all on a bad bet was pretty scary to me. As for potentially winning, why would I want to? I already had more money than I knew how to spend. Bela had given me ten thousand and one hundred dollars. I didn’t have any student loans to pay off, since my college fund and a little scholarship had managed to pay for everything. It seemed right to give some money to my dad, so I was going to wire him five thousand as soon as I could. I offered to send it all, but he didn’t want it. Told me to keep the rest and go shopping or something.

Go shopping? With five thousand bucks! What was he expecting me to buy?

“Listen Sam,” Dean said. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Um… I want you to know I understand why you did it. I understand why you went after the crossroads demon.”

Sam’s only response was a sigh. This conversation didn’t involve me but I was internally raising my hands to the sky and praising the Lord! We had reached a potential Winchester emotional breakthrough. Dean was seeing his brother’s point of view. Let there be rejoicing throughout the land!

“You know, situation was reversed, I guess I’d’ve done the same thing,” Dean went on. Still no reply from Sam. “I mean, I’m not blind, I see what you’re going through with this whole deal, me going away and all that. But you’re gonna be okay.”

“You think so?” asked Sam, without any emotion, as he passed the map back over his shoulder to me.

“Yeah, you’ll keep hunting, y’know, live your life. You’ll have Ellie and Bobby. They’ll take care of you, right Ellie?”

“Of course!” I chirped from the backseat, hoping a little old fashioned Ellie optimism might help Dean out. But Sam still didn’t respond.

“You’re stronger than me, Sam. You are!” Sam cleared his throat like he was about to finally say something, but it was going to be a denial and Dean didn’t want to hear that. “You are. You’ll get over it. But I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry for putting you through all this, I am.”

To my mind, this was just about the most emotionally honest thing Dean had ever said in his entire life, and it deserved a thorough round of applause. But Sam did not agree.

“You know what, Dean? Go screw yourself!”

I gasped as Dean replied, taking his stunned eyes off the road to look at his brother. “What?”

“I don’t want an apology from you! And by the way, I’m a big boy now, I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, well excuse me…”

“So would you please quit worrying about _me_?” Sam’s voice was reaching shouting volume. “I mean that’s the whole problem in the first place. I don’t want you to worry about me, Dean. I want you to worry about you! I want you to give a crap that you’re dying!”

I couldn’t see what Dean’s face looked like, but apparently it irritated Sam further, because he sighed and slumped backwards. I was sure he would have kicked something if he could.

“So that’s it? Nothing else to say for you?” he asked.

“I think maybe I’ll play craps,” said Dean.

Sam sighed. I sighed. We had well over an hour left to drive, and it was going to feel like ten.

 

* * *

 

We had decided to live a little, just for a night or two. That meant staying in a nice hotel. Not one of those five star places, but somewhere a little more exciting than our usual flea-ridden motels. I got a queen room to myself and the sheets were clean and fluffy. The boys shared as usual, only there was a bit more space. We had a connecting door between our rooms, but we’d gone to bed so late that I hadn’t even checked to see if it was unlocked yet.

In the morning, I enjoyed sprawling out across the huge bed, super cozy under the warm comforter. I stayed there until nine-thirty, glorying in just doing absolutely nothing. But staying in bed all day wasn’t going to spend my five thousand dollars, and though I wanted to save some of it, I definitely wanted to enjoy at least a small portion.

I took a shower, stopping to look at my eyebrows in the mirror. Bela had told me to get them plucked and given me a hundred dollars to do it. She was definitely just being deliberately nasty, but I could kind of see her point. They were a little thicker than I would have liked and they didn’t have a neat shape like Bela’s but there was nothing wrong with them, really. They weren’t movie star perfect, but they were hardly the worst thing about my appearance. If she’d really want to help me, she could have given me several grand for a boob job.

The water pressure in the shower was a welcome change, and it stayed hot the entire time. There were tiny little bottles of shampoo, which I laughed at, because each one contained just about enough to wash my hair one time. The towels were great, though. Big and fluffy, I was more than able to wrap one all the way around me. I didn’t have to get changed in the steamy bathroom for once, but went out into the rest of the room in just my towel, rejoicing in having my own space. Although…

I looked over at the connecting door. I did kind of owe Dean payback for his half naked push-ups. There’d been a few little incidents in our ongoing war of… whatever it was… but I still hadn’t really done anything to step up my game. I checked carefully to make sure the towel was covering everything properly, then adjusted it. A little lower just here, a little higher just there and I was good to go. I knocked on the connecting door and waited.

Dean was the one to open the door. He pulled it open. He looked at me, entirely naked except for a towel. His eyes definitely dropped as he grinned at me. There was a slight shifting of his shoulders and whatever he might have claimed, it took him a few seconds to speak.

“Hey Ellie.”

I made sure to brush past him slightly as I entered. Sam was sitting on one bed, tying up his shoes, so I figured the other bed was Dean’s. Being super careful not to let my towel slip, I climbed on, and lay down on my stomach, chin resting on my palm.  

“These beds are so comfy, huh?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Sam, looking up. Seeing me, he smiled and shook his head just slightly, before going back to tying his shoes.

“I’m not used to having such a big bed all to myself,” I said, checking Dean’s eyeline. He was not even pretending that he wasn’t staring at my breasts, which were safely secured in the towel, but obviously very distracting from where he was standing.

“So!” he said, suddenly, and loudly. “Roulette! Who’s with me?”

“Uh, I got plans,” Sam said, which I thought pretty mysterious.

“I think I’m gonna go shopping!” I said. “Buy something fun. Also… there’s an aquarium!”

“You want to look at a bunch of fish?” asked Dean.

Of course I did! Fish are great and I liked all the big bright ones. Plus, sometimes aquariums had other things like sharks and turtles. Turtles are adorable. “Sure! I haven’t been to an aquarium in years!”

“I’ll go with you,” Sam said, getting up. “This afternoon. Call me when you’re done shopping.” He disappeared into the bathroom.

“Are you gonna go out dressed like that?” asked Dean.

I smiled at him. “No! I gotta put some shoes on, first!”

The sound of Sam laughing drifted out of the bathroom. Figuring I actually should get dressed, I eased my way off the bed, though I had to hold onto my chest as I did so, concerned that the towel might slip a little. I didn’t want Dean to actually see everything!

On my way back through the door, Dean grabbed my wrist. “Whoa whoa, hold on, Princess. Sammy, get in here!”

Sam came out, toothbrush in hand, to see what his brother wanted.

“Bela gave us that extra thousand bucks, remember?” said Dean. “One of us is supposed to take you to a fancy dinner. Who’s it gonna be?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would actually be expected to act on that remark of Bela’s. She was just being rude, to all three of us. Getting to go to a fancy restaurant _did_ sound like fun, but I didn’t really know who I’d prefer to go with.

The trouble was I’d ordinarily choose Sam, no contest. He and I were much closer, we had more to talk about and he never yelled at me. However, I had recently tried to kiss him while blind drunk. Enthusiastically choosing him to be my fancy dinner date might give him the wrong impression, under the circumstances. I was also flirting pretty shamelessly with Dean, so choosing him had the potential to give off the wrong vibe as well. They both looked pretty damn good in a suit. Either way I’d probably have too much to drink and say embarrassing things.

“I couldn’t possibly choose,” I said, trying to come off as flirtatious rather than incredibly awkward. “Hey! Why don’t you guys just split the money and you can both buy me a present instead?”

Dean laughed. “Ha! You just got given ten thousand dollars, Ellie!”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “What could we possibly buy you that you can’t buy yourself?”

That was a good question, and I didn’t really want two five hundred dollar presents. I didn’t really want one. But there was no way I was going on a dinner date with either Winchester, so I had to say something.

“Well, I dunno boys. Seems like if you really loved me, you’d know what I want…”

Dean frowned. “Are you trying to do what Bela said and enslave us?”

“Why? Do you think that would work?”

 

* * *

 

At two o’clock, I was on the sidewalk outside the hotel. My morning had been super busy and I was supposed to meet Sam in the lobby, but I wanted to take everything back to my room first.

Have you ever been shopping with five thousand dollars in cash? Bad things happen! Mistakes are made! There’s just something about having that kind of money on you that makes you a little crazy and prevents you really thinking through your purchasing decisions. You know how you sometimes have to choose between buying those great jeans or that really nice top? _It doesn’t matter! I’ll buy both! I have all the money in the world!_

“Ellie!”

I had stopped to adjust my bags before I dropped something, when Sam called out to me while crossing the street. He reached me and I noticed he had his back pack but wasn’t carrying anything else. Clearly, he had not been spending his money all morning. He took the vast majority of my bags off me, looking at them as he did.

“You realise you’ll have to throw out most of your old clothes?”

I nodded. “Yeah… most of them are _real_ old, though. Half my jeans are super torn up.”

As we headed back into the hotel, he nodded towards me, his hands too full to point.

“You got your haircut.”

I smiled. I’d had a huge chunk taken off the bottom, so it no longer reached my butt, instead stopping somewhere in the middle of my back. “Yep. It’ll be a little easier to manage, now.”

“Looks good,” he said, though really I wouldn’t have blamed him if he hadn’t even noticed. There’s not that much difference between masses of frizzy hair to your waist and masses of frizzy hair that doesn’t reach your waist.

“Thanks. So what have you been doing?”

“Just went out,” said Sam, while I was pressing the button for the elevator. “By myself.”

It was unspoken, but I knew what he meant. No matter how much you like someone, being stuck with them all day every day does get irritating. I imagined Sam had just spent his morning walking, sitting quietly, and maybe reading. He probably had lunch without me or Dean commenting on his order while we argued over the fries.

In the elevator, we talked about Dean. He had apparently headed straight for a casino and Sam didn’t even know if we could expect to see him that night. He’d called me around about twelve-thirty to tell me to buy something I could wear in case we had another fancy party heist. Why Dean was thinking about my wardrobe while he was at a casino I did not know, but he had a good point. I’d picked up a real nice slinky pink dress because I looked super hot in it and “in case of fancy parties” was a great excuse.

When we got upstairs, Sam came into my room with me, dumping the bags he’d carried up on the bed. I’d gotten sweaty, so I wanted to get changed before we went anywhere else. I grabbed a new pair of jeans and a shirt and ducked into the bathroom before remembering. I peeked back out again.

“Oh! There’s a paper bag! I found this super fancy bakery and I got Dean some pecan pie! Can you put it in the fridge?”

“The green bag?” he called through the door, after I’d shut it. Now I thought about it, at least three of the bags were paper.

“Yep!” I called. “Got something for you too! You can have it when I get out!”

“I thought we were supposed to buy _you_ presents!”

I smiled as I changed my top. “That was a joke! I knew you wouldn’t!”

“Well that’s awkward! Because I did! Didn’t quite spend five hundred, though!”

Ooh! Present! I had been joking, and we’d ended up splitting the money, taking three hundred each and agreeing to spend the remaining hundred on gas. Sam had probably done the same as I had done for him, just seeing something I’d like and buying it.

When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting on my bed next to all the bags, waiting politely.

“Well?” I asked. I had a new pair of jeans that fit properly and weren’t torn anywhere. There was also a brand new button up in pink and white stripes. It was a little tight across the chest, making me look bustier than I actually was and that was okay with me.

“That looks nice?” he said. If he hadn’t seen me take the clothes out of a shopping bag, I was sure he wouldn’t have known they were new. I usually wore jeans and a shirt and I still was.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to have an opinion,” I reassured him, looking through the shopping bags. I found the one I was looking for and peeked inside. There were a few books for me, but the one I’d picked out for Sam was at the front. I grabbed it out and handed it to him.

“The History of the World in 20 Paintings,” he read, with an interested tone that was very gratifying.

“It’s a little bit of art, a little bit of history, a little bit of politics,” I said. “And absolutely nothing hunting related in it whatsoever. I think.”

“Thanks,” said Sam, and honestly, the sight of his dimpled smile made me want to run out and buy him a hundred more books. He flicked through the book while I checked myself in the mirror.

“Okay! Let’s go!” I said. “I wanna see a turtle!” I had looked at a brochure down in the hotel lobby and confirmed that there were turtles. Big ones.

“Wait!” Sam said, putting his new book down. “What about your present?” He opened his bag and fished inside for it.

I always loved presents, but it’s even more exciting when you have no idea what it could be. When Sam handed me a plain brown paper bag, I really couldn’t guess what was in it. The bag was only small, so it couldn’t have been anything I couldn’t hold in one hand. It was about as heavy as I expected for its size. I looked inside and found something that had been wrapped up in white tissue paper. I could see through it that it was pink, though.

I sat down to unwrap it and pulled out a long pink piece of hard plastic, riveted together, somewhat weighty. It was slightly curved so that my hand fit around it easily, and just where my thumb sat, there was a small switch. I smiled.

“Sam… Is this a pink switchblade?”

He just smiled in response, so I let the blade flick out. It was a curved and serrated blade, super shiny and by the looks of it, very sharp. It was beautiful and would definitely do some serious damage. Forget turtles, I wanted to go out and find something to kill.

“Pretty…” I muttered.

“If you’re not going to carry a gun, I figured you should at least have a better knife. Because it’s a switchblade, you can conceal it easier. Not that you would be carrying it out in the street.”

“God no!” I kept flicking out the blade and putting it back again, enjoying the quick action as it shot out.

“But I said it was strictly for hunting purposes, which is technically true.”

“I’d never use it on anything human,” I agreed, feeling the weight of it. I liked the serrated curve particularly. It would do more damage coming out than it would going in.

“The blade can be replaced,” Sam said, as I ran my finger along the safe edge. “I figured we could swap in a silver one.”

“Oh my God, yes!” I squealed. The number of things that were vulnerable to silver was surprising, so if I switched the blade out, it would be pretty much the perfect weapon.

The very best thing about it, of course, was that in fit in the pocket of my jeans easily. I’d even be able to hide it in my bra if I had to dress a little skimpy to go undercover. Flicking it closed one last time, I slid it into my jeans pocket and grabbed Sam’s hand to pull him up to his feet.

“Thankyou! But where the hell did you find it?” There were plenty of places you might be able to buy a knife, even a semi-legal one, but I imagined there wasn’t much market for concealed weapons that were also bright pink.

He shrugged. “You’re not the only one who’s good at shopping. Come on, it’s getting late.”

But he wasn’t going to get away that easy after a present like that. I grabbed hold of his shoulders to pull myself up, so I could kiss him on the cheek. Then I took his hand to pull him away with me.

“Turtle time!”

Even with his long legs he could barely keep up with me down the corridor to the elevator.

 

* * *

 

We got kicked out the aquarium at closing time, but I had seen enough fish to last me ten years, plus some turtles. There were stingrays and even frogs and lizards. I’d been shopping, I had a beautiful shiny knife and I got to see a bunch of pretty fish. So far, it had been one of the best days ever. When Sam let us both back into his room, we found Dean sitting on his bed, looking at his phone.

“And just where have you kids been?” he joked. “I was worried sick.”

“Sam bought me a pretty thing!” I told him, fishing it out of my pocket. I threw it at him, before opening up the dividing door.

I went into my room to get Dean’s pie and when I came back, he was examining the blade of my knife.

“Nice,” he said.

“I’m gonna get the blade swapped out for silver. Here, I found something nice for you.”

He flipped the blade back down and handed me back the knife at the same time as I handed him the little plastic container. He grinned when he saw it, a miniature pie, with a few of the pecans sprinkled on top so he could see what flavour it was.

“Pecan? Looks like someone wants to ride shotgun. Watch your back, Sammy.”

I gave him a playful slap on the arm. “Sam got a book! I don’t play favourites.”

Dean looked up at his brother and scoffed. “A book! I got pie.”

Of course, Sam was perfectly happy with his present, and he went into my room to fetch it back, apparently ready to settle down for the evening. But Dean had other plans.

“Isn’t anyone gonna ask what I did today?”

“Lost all your money on roulette?” I asked.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. It looked like pretty much all of it was still there. “Huh,” Sam said. “What did you break even?”

But Dean reached into his other pocket and pulled out a second stash. It was about the same size as the first. I squealed. “Oh my God! You doubled it?”

He responded by grinning at me and putting both wads down on the bed. “You buy that fancy dress like I told you?”

I nodded. I was very excited about where this was going. An extra five thousand dollars and I had to wear a fancy dress? “Yuh huh!”

“Do whatever it is you do. We’ll come get you at six-thirty.”

With a squeal of excitement, I hurried through into my room. I only had an hour to get myself up to the same level of fancy as my dress. At least I’d cut my hair. That would save some serious time. I had been thinking about buying a few new makeup essentials, but I hadn’t found the time in the end. I’d just have to make do with what I had. But no logistical problem could curb my excitement. I wasn’t getting left behind to take a bath and read this time. I was going somewhere fancy! 


	44. Chapter 43: Tiny Food

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean reveals his plans for the evening. And it involves Tiny Food.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I start my new job tomorrow, so I don’t know how exhausted I’ll be the next few weeks. I wanted to get this done beforehand, so here it is!

When the boys busted into my room, it was not quite six-thirty by my count. I heard them come through the connecting door while I was still finishing up my make-up in the bathroom mirror. The door was wide open and they could have come past and seen me, but I wanted to have my lipstick just right before I showed them the full outfit.

“Hold on! I’m almost done!” I called, before turning back to the mirror. I looked pretty good. I’d have liked to curl my hair properly, but I’d done my best with the hairdryer and the round handle of my hairbrush. Fortunately, my thick hair was already slightly curled, so it tended to hold the shape pretty easily. I’d offered a bellboy an extremely generous tip to go down the street and get me a can of extra strength hairspray. I had used so much that my hair could legally be classed as a chemical weapon.

Fortunately, my love of pink meant that I already had eyeshadow and lipstick that were near enough matches to my dress. A little bit of extra gloss, a bucket load of mascara and the right shade of blush and I looked pretty damn good. I was never going to get a modelling contract, but I looked super hot in my new dress. It was just about the pinkest dress I’d ever seen, one shoulder and of a pretty simple, clinging design. I’d had to buy a special bra to make it fit properly, but it was worth it.

I straightened up the dress and went out into the room, with a “Ta da!”

“I said look fancy, not smoking hot!” said Dean. “Good thing this _isn’t_ a heist, cos everyone’s gonna remember you were there.”

His flattery was rewarded with a kiss on the cheek, though I had to brush a little gloss off afterward. I wasn’t the only one looking smoking hot, either. They were wearing the tuxedos they’d picked up in Massachusetts and they made a nice pair. Sam had to bend down to retie his shoe, and turns out his butt looked particularly fine in tuxedo pants.

“So where are we going?” I asked.

We were only going to the hotel next door. It was slightly more expensive than ours, and the lobby was so shiny. There were white marble columns up to the roof and big mirrors everywhere, so that the space seemed much larger than it was. Everything shined and sparkled.

Dean steered me away from a sign that would have told me where we were headed, and produced three pieces of card, which I guessed were tickets to something. We waited for the elevator, and I became too excited to wait.

“Where are we going? Is it a fancy restaurant? Why do you have tickets? You hate the tuxedo! What is this?”

“Well, you wanted me to take you to a fancy party, Princess! And since I won over five grand today, I figured I’d get us last minute tickets to this one.”

I gasped, more than happy to let him call me Princess if he was taking me to a real swanky party.

“Oh my God, Dean!!!”

“You’re welcome.”

“A fancy party and _two_ hot dates!” I said. “This is definitely the best day ever!”

“Hey, hold on,” Dean said. “I’m the only hot date. But I’m a classy guy and I know how bad you want me, so Sam’s here to chaperone. He’s gonna defend my honour if you start getting fresh.”

Sam found this quietly amusing, and there was a slight hint of dimple as he smiled. I blushed and focused on my shoes. I did want Dean pretty bad, but he didn’t know about the attempted kissing incident. Having both of them with me was for the best. I couldn’t be trusted alone with either Winchester. Especially if I got some alcohol into me.

An older couple arrived to wait for the elevator with us. She was wearing a black dress, a lot longer than mine and her diamond necklace looked like it was worth as much as my house. I wondered if they were going to the same party and I looked down at my dress. It was kind of short.

“Do you think my dress will be okay?” I muttered. It came to just above my knees. I thought that was alright, based on what Bela had been wearing the other night. But maybe this would be a classier kind of party.

“Sure, you look fine,” Dean said, and Sam nodded agreement.

“Sweetheart, don’t worry about it,” said the older lady. “I’d wear it, if I had your figure.” She took her husband’s arm as the elevator door opened. “Don’t stare, dear.”

We got into the elevator with the old couple and they were going up to the second floor too.

“So, what kind of party is it?” I asked.

“It’s a charity ball,” said the older lady. “For the hospital. We go every year.”

She was a nice lady, but she seemed pretty posh. Still, she didn’t seem to mind that I was going to her rich people party, so maybe nobody else would mind, either. She gave me another smile as she and her husband emerged from the elevator, and we stepped out after them.

“I hope everyone’s as nice as her,” I said, nudging Sam. He had not said that much. “Don’t worry. You won’t have an old lady date this time! We can have some fun!”

He smiled at that and let me take his hand and pull him after Dean. We entered into a big ball room. I’d been to a wedding once that had been kind of pricey, and it had been in a place sort of like this one. That room had definitely been a lot smaller, though. There’d been a bunch of big tables and a smallish dance floor. This was way different. There were lots of smaller tables, like at a restaurant, and there was a stage with a band. Just a little one, a string quartet, but they were there live, playing classical music, instead of a DJ or anything. There were a few little sofas, and in front of the stage, a big dance floor. People were already sitting or standing around and talking, and there were waiters carrying what looked like free champagne and food, and offering it to people. Part of one wall was a bar, and there were two people serving, as well as waiters going in and out through the adjoining door.

There was also one thing that my friends’ wedding definitely didn’t have.

“Look at that chandelier!” I gasped, nudging Dean. “It’s so shiny!”

Right in the centre of the ballroom hung a huge chandelier. I couldn’t tell what it was made of, but I was assuming glitter. All the lights were on, reflecting off the shiny surface and making the whole thing sparkle so much you couldn’t really see where it started and ended. It was like a glowing orb of shiny was hanging in the air above the room.

“Everything’s so pretty!” I said. “And look! That girl’s dress is way shorter than mine. This is going to be awesome!”

“And we’re really not working?” asked Sam.

“Really,” Dean promised. “No case, no weird stuff. Nothing. Just have fun.”

Sam still seemed suspicious. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Dean said. “Go, find food on sticks or whatever it was. I see an open bar.”

He began a quick walk across the crowded floor to get to the bar, while I turned to look up at Sam. “You don’t seem excited! A night off hunting, some fun… come on, Sam! Let’s get food on sticks!”

I could see he was fighting against it, but he ended up smiling, anyway, and letting me drag him towards a wandering waiter.

 

* * *

 

Not all the food was on sticks, but some of it was. There were big meat balls and also those mini tomatoes with some kind of cheese, all wrapped in bacon, with a little stick through to keep it together. There were also little pieces of bread with a delicious paste on them, cute tiny quiches and what was basically the world’s smallest hamburger, but the waiter said it had some fancy name.

There was no sitting down to eat a dinner like at a wedding, just tray after tray of tiny food. Waiters just kept coming up to me and offering me things, including glasses of champagne.

Sam had stayed with me all night, and he didn’t seem to be getting a lot of enjoyment out of the party for its own sake. He wasn’t as impressed as I was by chandeliers or tiny burgers or other people’s pretty clothes. We’d sampled all the food, had a sensible amount of wine (in unspoken agreement not to get drunk together again), and talked to other people.

A few friendly people had come up to us and we’d put together convincing backstories for ourselves as we went. Sam was Samuel Blake, an art historian from Vermont. I was Elenore Roberts, a rare book collector and yachting enthusiast. We were secret lovers, regularly meeting for trysts while attending auctions in the same city. We had to keep it all secret because my conservative family did not approve of Sam or his blue collar background. We didn’t tell anyone that part of the story, of course, but tried to convey a sense of mystery and secret rebellion whenever we told people we were “just good friends”.

About three hours in, we were talking with a middle-aged lady. Her name was Gloria, she was local, and like the older pair we’d met at the elevator, she came to the hospital fund raiser every year. It seemed like a lot of the people there knew each other, and maybe that was why we attracted attention.

“Oh, I’m a great lover of art,” she said, on hearing about Sam’s fake career. “Is there a particular period that interests you?”

“I specialise in medieval religious art, especially illuminated manuscripts,” Sam said, without missing a beat. “My doctoral thesis is on how the depiction of demons and Hell in the middle ages influenced belief in modern Christianity.”

 _Nice_ , I thought. He would have no problem talking further on that subject if he was pushed. We’d both read an awful lot about demons and Hell.

“Goodness me,” said Gloria. “That sounds way over my head. Are you very far into your doctorate?”

“I’m almost finished,” said Sam.

“How exciting! And do you have plans for afterward?”

Sam sighed somewhat dramatically. “I’m hoping having my doctorate will really change the way people see me…”

He looked down at me, a slightly wistful expression, as I looked up at him, hoping my pain at my snobbish family would register in my eyes. Sam was great! How dare my imaginary family judge him so harshly!

Gloria must have sensed something, though it was impossible to say whether our specific backstory was the interpretation she was making. Either way, she put a hand gently on my wrist.

“Well, it was such a pleasure meeting the both of you. Enjoy the rest of your night, won’t you?”

We both assured her that we would and watched her disappear towards the bar. I was finally able to laugh, and Sam’s face split into a smile.

“It’s okay. I’m sure once you have those letters after your name, my family will come to respect you.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “We might have to elope.”

I gasped. “We couldn’t! My mother would never forgive me. How could she show her face at the yacht club, Sam?!”

He smiled as he took my empty wineglass off me and put it down on the table beside him. “Speaking of family… where’s Dean?”

We’d been tracking his movements all night, speculating on his likely targets among the apparently single women in the room. He’d come up to talk to us a few times, complaining that he could not get any beer. He didn’t like wine or champagne because “it’s fruit pretending to be alcohol”, but he drank it anyway, since it was all there was and it was free.

Looking around the ballroom, we eventually spotted him at the other end, turning the charm onto a blonde woman. I couldn’t see her clearly over the distance, but she was sitting quite close to him, which was a good sign. We left him to do his thing and looked around the rest of the room. I was about to get up to grab some more wine when Sam suddenly spoke.

“You want to dance?”

The string quartet had taken a few short breaks, but for the most part they’d been playing all night. As the guests had started getting a bit tipsy, more and more of them had been stepping out onto the open space and dancing. There were younger couples and older ones, married people and a few who looked as if they’d just met. It was all slow dancing, but some of them were doing what seemed like proper steps while others kind of stood in one spot and swayed.

“I don’t know how,” I said. I’d done a little slow dancing at prom and maybe once at a wedding, but mostly all I knew was the kind of dancing you did at a club.

“You don’t have to,” Sam said. “I do. You just have to stand there and move when I move.”

 _Dammit Winchester_ , I thought, _What, you weren’t hot enough? Now you can dance as well?_

“Okay,” I said. “But if I look stupid, it’s your fault.”

He smiled and grabbed my hand. We were already standing next to the dance floor, so he was easily able to get us started.

“You know where to put your hands?” he asked.

I was pretty sure one hand was supposed to go on his shoulder, but there was no way I would reach properly without stretching up onto my toes. I was wearing heels but they didn’t give me quite that much extra height. He was a full foot taller than me. I tried reaching anyway, and he smiled at me as I stretched.

He grabbed my hand and guided it down to his upper chest, just below the shoulder. “There’s fine,” he said.

“Well where does the other one go?”

He took my right hand with his left and moved his left hand onto my waist. His hands were so huge and his grip on my waist was firmer than I would have expected. Fortunately, I was only slightly tipsy, and fully in control of myself. I had no urge whatsoever to kiss him or even stare at him. I just looked where we were going as he pulled me firmly away from the table we’d been standing by.

“Where did you learn to dance?” I asked.

“College,” he said. “But this is about all I can do.”

He just moved me slowly across the room, one direction and then another. Sometimes he’d look at his feet, other times at where we were going and sometimes at me. I didn’t have to do anything at all, just let my feet follow naturally where he pulled me.

I knew a little about Sam’s poor college girlfriend, Jessica. Maybe they’d gone dancing together sometimes. He had told me once that she could make him do anything just by smiling. He’d also said she was much more outgoing than he was. I could imagine her dragging him onto a dancefloor and putting his hands in just the right place that he didn’t want to let go. He’d have had to dance, just to keep holding her.

“Well this is fun,” I said, watching an older man dip his partner down with beautiful grace. “I don’t think I’m ready for that!”

“Yeah, there’s a fifty percent chance I’d drop you,” Sam said. “So… what’s the verdict? Are you going to give up Hunting and find a job that’s all slow dancing and food on sticks?”

I shook my head. “Nah. It’s fun one time, but I’d probably get bored of it. Everything sure is pretty though. The room, the chandelier, the champagne, the clothes.”

“The people,” Sam added. “But I do not want to wear this thing every day.”

“You look great in it,” I said, apparently drunk enough to be honest, at least. “Real hot.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Your hair looks amazing.”

“Just my hair?” I teased, looking up at his face. There was a slight blush there.

“No. Not just your hair.”

I was aware that I looked pretty hot in my dress, but it was a nice feeling to have that confirmed by someone else. Plus, being pressed up close to Sam, with his hand so firmly holding my waist, gave me a nice warm feeling in my stomach. Nothing dramatic, just a nice, positive feeling, because he could have done like Dean and looked for other girls to spend an evening with. But he was my friend and he wanted to spend time with me.

We spent another ten minutes, going from one side of the floor to the other, quite slowly. Sam became a little more confident as we went, and was able to focus less, looking around the room with me at other dancers. I admired one dress or another, and he listened as though he cared, though he almost certainly didn’t.

I got to the end of a spiel about the puffy tulle on a girl nearby. “I saw a dress like it and I would have bought it but I thought it wouldn’t travel so well. I just love the puffy skirt. Look at it when she twirls!”

“Yeah, it’s nice,” he agreed.

“Well, which dress do you like best, then?” I asked.

He thought about this for a moment. “I do like that grey one. On the red-head.”

“I think that’s the girl, not the dress,” I smiled. “Honestly, she’d make a paper bag look hot.”

“True,” Sam agreed. “But I think yours is nice. It’s so bright. And it suits you.”

“Sure does!” A very familiar voice spoke before I could answer. Dean was standing right beside us, and Sam gently pulled me to a stop, so I didn’t fall over when he paused.

“You cutting in?” he asked his brother.

“Yep,” Dean said, and Sam quite willingly stepped aside.

I was perfectly happy to swap one for the other, and I knew the drill now. I waved as Sam stepped backward towards a chair, and then got one hand up onto Dean’s shoulder. He had a slightly different approach, putting both hands on my hips. That left me with a hand free, so I reached up and linked both arms around his neck.

“There’s no way you can dance too!” I said.

“You don’t get me as well as you think you do, sweetheart!” He started moving me back towards the middle of the room. “So, you get your tiny food?”

“Yep,” I said. “And champagne!”

“You drunk?”

I shook my head. “Not really. Been having fun?”

He grinned down at me. “These rich chicks can’t stay away.”

That certainly seemed to be true, based on what I’d seen. “What are you doing over here, then? We’ve been watching you. You could take your pick.”

He shrugged. “Not in the mood. You’re the only girl going home with me.”

Technically this was true, and I knew the innuendo was just him having a little fun. I gave him a light slap on the shoulder. “Yeah… never gonna happen.”

“And should I expect my brother back tonight?” he teased.

I slapped his shoulder again and he laughed, still perpetually amused by the idea of me being Sam’s girlfriend. Thank God he didn’t know about the attempted kiss. The mocking would never stop.

“You meant it, right?” he asked. “When you said you’d take care of him?”

“Of course!” I said. “But we’re gonna find a way…”

“Ellie,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “You gotta promise me. He’s gonna need you.”

I still held out hope that Dean could be saved, but maybe he was right. Perhaps we did need to be prepared for the possibility that he really was going to Hell in seven months. It didn’t mean I’d stop looking for a way to save him, or trying to encourage him to believe. But… if it made him feel better to know his brother would be okay without him, I ought to give him that.

“I promise,” I said.

“I don’t mean hunting with him and having his back and all that stuff. I mean take care of him, the way you do.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, unless he just needed me to be emotionally supportive. Perhaps he didn’t know the words to describe that. Dean was not that great with emotion, but I had seen him try his best, including the argument in the car the previous night. He’d tried to understand how Sam was feeling, and even I had been surprised at the negative reaction he’d received. That must have been tough for him, reaching out in a way he wasn’t used to, only to be rebuffed like that. Not that I blamed Sam either. He had a right to whatever feelings he had. But I could see why Dean found it difficult.

“The way I do? You mean, listen to him? Talk to him?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Dean. “You’ve been taking care of Sam almost as long as I have, Ellie. And I don’t know what you do, but it works, so you gotta promise me you won’t stop.”

“I promise,” I repeated.

“You know… I didn’t hate you when we were kids,” he said, gripping my waist a little tighter as he manoeuvred me out of the way of an elderly couple.

“Yeah you did!”

He shook his head. “No. Damn, you were annoying, but I liked you better than you thought I did.”

“Uhuh,” I said, sceptically. “That’s why you called me names and pulled my hair and stole my dolls, huh?”

He grinned. “That I did cos it was funny. But Sammy liked you. He was happier when he was with you. I didn’t get why, but it didn’t matter. You made Sam happy, so I liked you.”

I grinned. I remembered twelve-year-old Dean playing hide and go seek with Sam and I like it was a total drag and he hated it. He used to hold my dolls way up above my head and laugh when I screeched. I remembered when we were a bit older, and I would blush so hard my face got sore, while he completely ignored me. When I was ten, he threatened to cut off my plait; he had the scissors in his hand and everything. I bawled so loud, my Dad came running, thinking I was hurt. If he had even remotely liked me, he did a great job of hiding it.

“You know, you could make him happy yourself,” I said. “By actually trying to save your life.”

He shook his head. “I can’t Ellie. Not if it means he dies. I can’t do it. You saw me when he was dead… Don’t ask me to go through that again.”

“But you’re asking him to go through it,” I said.

I felt his right hand tighten on my waist and wondered if he even knew he was tensing up.

“Yeah, well… Sam’s got a chance at some kinda life. I don’t.”

John Winchester sure had moulded himself the perfect Hunting machine. I did not for one second believe that Dean wasn’t capable of living another kind of life. More likely he just didn’t believe he deserved one.

“Sure you do,” I said. “Just as much chance as Sam.”

He shook his head. “You really see me, dying old, wife and kids?”

There were more than two kinds of life. Options existed other than Hunter who dies young and happily married with a family, but all the same… “Sure. Why not?”

He smiled, as he spun me back around and started to lead me back towards Sam. I realised we had deliberately drifted far away from him, but if we were going back, the conversation was obviously over.

“What you’re doing right now… That’s the kind of thing I mean,” he said. “Just… do this. Promise.”

It was the third time, but if that’s what he needed to believe that I’d be there to take care of Sam if he was gone, then okay. “Promise.”


	45. Chapter 44: Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has reasons to contemplate what it even means to be a monster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode Guide: This chapter is set during 3x07: Fresh Blood

We were in a dark, dingy back alley in Albany, a far cry from the shiny chandelier I’d been looking at just one night earlier. Shining our torches into every corner, we sought out movement.

My day had started with Sam showing me two articles. One was about young women going missing after visiting a nightclub. The other was about a serial killer who was leaving as many as two victims a night with enormous blood loss but very little blood at the crime scene. The cause of death was blood loss but the only wounds were punctures to the neck. Both the missing girls and the murders were in Albany, and it sounded like a straight up vampire case. We figured the missing girls were probably an attempt to form a new nest.

We’d packed up and headed out immediately, on what should have been a four hour drive to Albany. Instead it had been six hours, thanks to roadwork and a period of bumper to bumper traffic that proved all Dean’s fears about the Jersey Turnpike to be correct.

Eventually we’d made it and by the time we’d checked into a motel and eaten something, it was getting dark. We had headed down to the club where the girls had gone missing, to see what was what. But we’d spotted trouble before we’d even got there. The club was in a warehouse in the dock area along the river, and we parked as near as we could before getting out to walk. As we stood at the trunk, debating what weapons we ought to take, we heard screams. That made the decision for us, and we each grabbed a machete and a torch while Dean pocketed the syringe we’d filled with Dead Man’s Blood.

Running towards the screams, we found a woman lying on the ground, surrounded by onlookers. Someone was administering first aid and another public spirited citizen called the police. The victim swore that a blonde woman had jumped out from between two buildings and tried to bite her neck. When people had come to help, the woman had run off back down the alley. No one even noticed that the three of us were trying to conceal large machetes. They were too busy gawking and mumbling about psychos and whacked out druggies. We’d heard enough and the three of us ran off down the alley, hoping to catch us a vampire.

So there we were, machetes in one hand, torches in the other. We’d spent ten minutes following the sounds of footsteps, running from alley to alley. We’d passed two bloodied bodies and checked. Both dead. Once, we’d caught a glimpse of blonde hair as she turned a corner. Then we must have turned the wrong way, because she’d gotten away from us again. We’d go one way and find ourselves back on a crowded street. I’d have to hand my machete to one of the boys and ask bystanders if they’d seen anything. No one ever had, so back we’d go, into the mess of alleys that separated the old warehouses along the docks. The cops were coming. We couldn’t let them be the ones to catch her.

Listening for any sign of our prey, I was just starting to worry we’d never find her when my torch beam fell across something red. I steadied and focused. Definitely blood. Oh God. That was three. When I hurried towards it, the boys quickly followed.

There was a man, early thirties, maybe. The blood was coming from his neck, pooling quickly beside him. He was still conscious, and he reached out a little as he saw us coming. I got down on my knees right away, putting my torch and machete down and pressing my hand to his wound.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” I told him, only fifty percent sure that it was. He’d lost a lot of blood. As Sam came up behind me, I reached for my cell phone. “I’m gonna call an ambulance.”

“Where is she?” Dean asked him, “Where’d she go?”

The poor guy couldn’t answer properly. He just pointed weakly. Dean ran off, and Sam looked unsure for a moment before getting down with me. He took the phone off me so he could dial 911, while I did my best to administer first aid. My hand wasn’t enough to stem the flow of blood from his neck, and I looked around me for something that would help.

I was momentarily distracted by Dean, his arm held out beside him, dripping blood.

“Smell that?! Come and get it!”

Wow… He was not messing around! Turning my attention back to the man bleeding out in front of me, I realised I was wearing an old plaid over my tank top. I hadn’t gotten rid of most of my old clothes yet, and this one had been grabbed from the floor of the Impala when I’d been cold. Figuring it could die for a noble cause, I grabbed Sam’s free hand while he spoke into my cell.

“Ambulance… Hello?”

I put his hand up to the neck wound, and realising what I wanted, he pushed against it. With both hands free I was able to whip my shirt off. Ignoring the chill, I folded it a little to get a good flat coverage. Then I nudged Sam’s hand out of the way with it as he gave our location to the ambulance dispatcher.

With one hand, I held the shirt against the guy’s neck, and it seemed to cover the whole wound, where my fingers could not. Hopefully it would at least help a little. I could hear Dean, evidently enjoying the hunt. “Whoo!” he breathed.

With my free hand, I reached for the man’s wrist, so I could check his pulse, and I barely registered Sam slipping my cell onto my lap.

“Hey, there’s an ambulance coming,” I said, looking into his pale face as I counted in my head. “And til then, I got ya, okay?”

He gave the very faintest of nods, and, not too thrilled about his heart rate, I shifted my hand to take hold of his. I gave it a little squeeze. It felt like maybe he tried to squeeze back, but he was so weak it was really hard to tell.

“Ellie!” called Dean, “Meet us back at the car!”

I looked up long enough to see that the boys were carrying an unconscious blonde figure between them, as they headed out the other end of the alley. Obviously Dean’s dramatic methods had worked, and he’d managed to stick the vampire with the Dead Man’s Blood.

It was important to keep my patient conscious, so I tried talking to him. “You gotta stay awake til help gets here, okay? What’s your name?”

He opened his mouth, but speaking was obviously too difficult. No sound came out.

“Don’t strain yourself. What if I talk to you, huh? My name’s Ellie. Uh… I’m from South Dakota… um… Mount Rushmore’s not that great?” What else do you say when introducing yourself? I could see he was trying to focus on my face while I was speaking, and if that was keeping him conscious, I could say more boring shit about me. What do guys ask in bars? “Oh! I’m not into astrology but I’m a Cancer. Crabs are kinda cute, huh? I know everything there is to know about cars, but I wouldn’t say I’m a car person. My daddy and I just strip ‘em for a living, ya know?”

I thought I heard a siren, but I kept babbling at him for another five minutes, holding his blood inside him. I covered my favourite colours, foods, TV shows and books. I told him that I liked every season but especially Spring because I like flowers but also the way rain smells. Then there was my college, my major and my thoughts on Madison versus Sioux Falls.

“This ain’t a come on, and you’ll never see me again, but I gotta say something so here’s what my personal ad would sound like… uh… single woman, mid-twenties seeks tall, kind, intelligent, funny, smoking hot, um…” I nearly said “sexually experienced” but felt that might be too much information, even to keep someone alive… “strong, interesting man to watch crap movies and eat crap food with.”

I noticed myself saying “man” even as I said it, knowing full well that wasn’t necessarily a requirement. But I’d admitted that out loud once in my life and I wasn’t about to do it again to a complete stranger.

“Non-smoker preferred,” I went on. “I enjoy hunting, dancing and short walks on the beach. I’m a dog person. That should about cover it, don’t you think?” He looked up at me, his eyes somewhat unfocused, but I could read his mind. “Yeah… they’re not exactly breaking my door down! You’re right. I should probably lower my standards.”

There was a voice, maybe from the entrance to the alleyway. “Hello?”

“Hello!” I called, hoping for help at last. I couldn’t twist my body around enough to see, not without loosening the pressure I was putting on his neck. “We’re down here!”

* * *

I got back to the car to find the boys sitting there, all nonchalant, like they didn’t have an unconscious vampire in their trunk. Just two guys, chilling in a car, waiting for their friend, no biggie.

Our motel was one of the crappiest we’d ever stayed in, especially in contrast to the fancy place we’d stayed in Atlantic City. Still, the management were pointedly uncurious and had no issue whatsoever with our asking for spare mattresses and using them to black out the windows. As long as we had the cashy money to pay for their silence, they were happy.

No one even seemed to notice us dragging in an unconscious woman, which is concerning really, when you think about it. Sure, in this case she was a vampire, but there’s a lot of people even shadier than hunters in the world.

After we had her tied to a chair, a new syringe of Dead Man’s Blood prepared and a machete each, it was just a matter of waiting until she woke up. We watched her sleeping, slumped forward in the chair. She still had blood around her mouth. From my guy in the alley, probably. She was skinny and maybe twenty-one when she got turned. She was dressed sorta nice, casual but pretty, like you’d dress for a date.

I’d been sitting at the table, reading emails on my phone, but as she started to stir, I grabbed my machete and moved to stand in between the boys. I could be just as intimidating as a Winchester!

She woke up slow and confused, in a way that actually reminded me of myself on an ordinary morning. I was that out of it without anything nasty in my system. She opened her eyes, blinking a little at the lights and then her eyes opened wide, startled, as she took us in. Her first instinct was to pull at the ropes binding her arms as Dean bent over her.

“You with us?!” he asked, voice booming, even more so than usual.

She began to panic then, struggling at her ropes, looking at Dean in horror. She was totally conscious now.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said.

She looked up again, like she’d noticed me for the first time. But before she could really take me in, Sam spoke.

“Where’s your nest?”

She turned to him now, and the expression in her eyes seemed like genuine confusion. “What?”

Maybe that wasn’t what she called it. “Nest!” Dean repeated. “Where you and your bloodsucking pals hang out.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” The boys rolled their eyes, but I wasn’t so sure it was an act. Something about her panic didn’t seem like a fang who knew she’d been caught by hunters. It was more hysterical, disoriented…

“Please!” she begged, looking to me. “I don’t feel good!”

“Yeah, well,” said Dean. He reached for the syringe on the table, waving it at her. “You’re gonna feel a hell of a lot worse if we give you another shot of Dead Man’s Blood.”

She looked scared, terrified even, but not in the way I would have expected. A vampire who knew what Dead Man’s Blood was, and what it could do to them… they’d be more aggressive. She wasn’t threatening at all. If this was an act, it seemed silly. Most vampires just owned to what they were.

“Just let me go!”

Sam chuckled. “Yeah, you know we can’t do that!”

“I’m telling you the truth.” She stared telling Sam, but I guess his face didn’t seem sympathetic. She tried me. “I’m just… I took something. I’m freaking out! I don’t know what’s going on!”

I looked at Sam, raising one eyebrow. Seemed to me like maybe she was telling the truth. But Dean didn’t like me taking the lead. He’d be especially mad if I took things in a direction he wasn’t expecting. But Sam, he might get away with it.

He stared at my face for a moment, and sighed. He came closer to the chair, leaning in to her face. Not threatening, like Dean. More coming down to her level. “You took something?”

“Yes! I can’t come down! I just want to come down!”

If she was faking, she was seriously good. But, wouldn’t that be a good way to repopulate the species? Just give people a bit of your blood, flavour it with something, tell them it was a party drug. The Maker could plan to find them later, or maybe not. Maybe just do it on a massive scale and let them go. Some would get caught by hunters, but not all…

Even Dean seemed to be somewhat taken aback. He flashed me a look, and it wasn’t angry. It was confused. I’m sure my face was the same.

“What’s your name?” Sam asked her, his tone much kinder. Seemed like he believed too.

“Lucy. Please, just let me go.”

Sam looked up at Dean and I. But I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t see if Dean gave him any kind of signal, but Sam sighed.

“Alright, Lucy. How about this? If you tell us what happened, we’ll let you go?”

“You will?” she asked.

No. There was no way we could just let her go. She’d already been turned. But I smiled and tried my best not to look fake as she looked up at me.

“Uh… I don’t really… um…” she was having trouble with her memory, but seemed like she really believed this was her best chance to survive. Poor thing. “It’s not that clear. I was at Spider.”

“Spider?” I asked.

“The club. On Jefferson. And there was this guy. He was buying me drinks.”

“This guy, what’s he look like?” Sam asked.

“He was old. Like thirty.” I nearly laughed. Dean had to be insulted. “He had brown hair, a leather jacket… uh… Deacon or Dixon or something. Said he was a dealer… he had something for me.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“Something new.  _Better than anything you’ve ever tried._ He put a few drops in my drink.”

“Was the drug red and thick?” asked Dean, little sympathy in his tone. Might have been the remark about thirty being old. Lucy nodded. “Well, genius move there. That was vampire blood he dosed you with.”

“What?” she asked. Maybe she thought we were part of her high.

“Yeah, you just took a big steamin’ shot of the nastiest virus out there!” Dean told her. Way to break it gently.

“You’re crazy!” I could certainly see why she’d think that. “He gave me roofies or something! No… The next thing I know, we’re at his place and he says he’s gonna get me something to eat and to just wait. But I get  _so hungry!_ ”

Sam and Dean had backed off her, but I crouched down to her level. Sure, I’m a softie or a bleeding heart or whatever but this was a crappy situation and she hadn’t done anything wrong. Maybe it’s not the best idea to take drugs from strangers, but lots of people do stupid shit like that and it doesn’t mean they deserve to die. She was a victim.

“You ran away, huh?” I asked her.

She obviously saw that I was the most sympathetic to her story. She nodded. “But it won’t wear off, whatever he gave me!”

“Lights seem really bright, don’t they?” I asked her. She nodded. “And the sun hurts your skin?”

“Yeah! And smells… And I can  _hear_ blood pumping.”

“Well, I hate to tell you this sweetheart, but your blood’s never pumping again.” It didn’t sound like Dean hated to tell her at all.

She just shook her head at him, maybe not hearing the scorn in his tone. “Not mine. Yours! I can hear a heart beating from half a block away. I just want it to stop.”

I looked up at Sam, and he looked back at me. I was sure he felt for her the same as I did, but what could either of us do? She’d already fanged up.

Dean went on. “All right, listen Wavy Gravy. It’s not going to stop. You’ve already killed two people. Almost three.”

I had almost forgotten that, and I didn’t know how to feel about it. She was acting on instinct, because she’d been turned into something new. That was not her fault. I remembered the email Sam had written to me the year before about some of things we hunted and how they were just trying to live, same as anyone. I knew now, from talks late into the night, that he was talking about a girl he’d met. She’d been a werewolf, but he didn’t know when he met her. She didn’t know. He killed her, because she asked him to. She didn’t want to be a monster.

I didn’t think Lucy did either. She started to cry. “No! I couldn’t. No! I was hallucinating!”

“You killed them alright,” Dean told her. “We followed a sloppy trail of corpses to get to you.”

“No! No, it wasn’t real! It was the drug! Please! Please, you have to help me!” she insisted, turning from one of us to another.

Sam jerked his head towards the bedroom, and Dean led the way out. I followed behind them, looking back at Lucy as she called after me. “No! No!”

“She doesn’t even know what she is,” I said.

“Poor girl,” Sam agreed.

Dean sighed, looking from Sam to me. He knew where we were coming from, I could see that in his eyes. But, I guess, with the two of us so torn about the issue, Dean didn’t have the luxury of being sorry.

“We don’t have a choice,” he said.

I knew that. But I shook my head sadly as Dean took his machete off his belt. I should have asked to do it. Maybe I could have found a way to be gentle about it. Kinder. I could have come up from behind maybe, so she didn’t expect it, didn’t have to be so afraid in her last seconds.

But I didn’t, because I’m a coward and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill that poor girl. As Dean headed into the other room, I tried to remind myself that Deacon or Dixon or whoever had killed her. Dean was just taking away the pain. Violently.

“No! Please!” she screamed.

I couldn’t watch. I turned my head, and felt Sam’s arm quickly go around me, as my face went into his chest. I didn’t have to see it, but I could still hear her scream, and the sound of metal through bone and the thump of her head hitting the floor.

* * *

Sam offered to go with Dean to get rid of the body. I stayed behind and scrubbed up a little blood that got left. I pulled down the least mouldy mattress and got my blanket. At least I’d have something other than the floor to sleep on and since our room had a little bedroom part and a living part, I’d even be semi separated from the boys, which was nice. There was no door that closed, but I put my mattress round the corner a little for some privacy.

I figured I might as well take a shower and change into my pyjamas. I heard the boys come back while I was in the bathroom. I hurried it up in case they needed to shower too. Disposing of a body can leave you feeling pretty dirty.

Dean went straight to bed, but Sam wanted to shower. I sat on my mattress, knees up to my chin, listening to the grunts and half snores Dean made in the other room.

Sam finally came back out, and then I knew I was in a bad place. He had nothing on but his boxers and a grey v-neck shirt and I barely noticed. I didn’t even blush.

“You gonna be okay to sleep there?” he asked.

I nodded. “At least it doesn’t smell like pee.” Some of the others had.

Sam wrinkled his nose at the thought. “You don’t have a pillow. I’ll grab you one of mine.”

Before I could say no or yes or thank you, he’d already crept into the bedroom. He came back out thirty seconds later. The white pillow case had some alarming pale brown stains on it, but it was better than nothing. It was almost certainly the best one, too. No way Sam kept the best pillow for himself.

It took him a while but he managed to lower himself onto the mattress beside me. Watching from below, it was like a building slowly collapsing. He gave my knee a little nudge, so I’d put my legs down and he could slip the pillow onto my lap.

“How you doing?”

“I’ll be okay,” I said, hugging my new pillow. “You?”

Sam sighed and I realised he had not sat down because he was worried about me. “She didn’t want to be a monster, Ellie…”

I nodded. “We have to find this guy that turned her. He’s done this to at least three girls. That we know of.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “But… it won’t get Lucy her life back.”

“I’m trying not to think of her as a monster we killed. This creep killed her when he turned her. We just…”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

There was obviously something he wanted to talk about. I thought maybe he’d been reminded of that painful night with his werewolf friend. “Are you thinking of Madison?”

Sam shook his head, but smiled at me for a moment. Maybe he appreciated that I’d asked, even though I was wrong. I didn’t know why else he’d smile.

He leant forward as much as he could and peered around the empty doorframe. He was obviously checking if Dean was truly asleep. Then he turned toward me, his voice only just above a whisper.

“Ellie, I gotta tell you something. But don’t… you gotta promise… you can’t  _ever_  tell Dean.”

There wasn’t a force on earth that could make me betray a secret of Sam’s. I wouldn’t when I was eight and I wouldn’t now either. Anyway, he knew my deepest secret and I was sure he’d never betray me. I owed him the same.

“I could never. Not ever.”

He sighed, and swallowed. He had to speak right up close to me, and I could almost hear the spittle his lips made forming the words more clearly than the words themselves.

“In Cold Oak… before I died… I saw the Yellow Eyed Demon. I mean, he talked to me.”

He stopped there, but that was obviously not the whole secret. I had even assumed that had happened.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Go on…”

He shifted even closer to me, his thigh pressed right up against mine. One arm went around my back, so he could bring his lips even closer to my ear. It was intimate, but not in the sense of being sexual or romantic. Just totally honest and open. Whatever he was about to tell me, it was something he could barely even say. Maybe he was pressed close to me not so I could hear him more easily, but because this secret was hurting him so bad he needed the warmth of another person.

“He showed me the night he killed my mom. She knew him.”

I stared at him, in shock. Mary Winchester had known the demon who killed her? How? Him or the vessel he’d been possessing? But why didn’t Sam want Dean to know this?

He shook his head. “There’s more. She… she recognised him, but that’s not what he wanted to show me.” I just looked into his beautiful, tearful eyes, mostly brown in that moment and looking back into mine like he was scared. Scared maybe, of how I’d react to the revelation he was about to offer.

“Me… the others…” I assumed he meant the other psychic children who’d been pitted against one another. “He came to all our nurseries and he… uh…” He took a deep breath, while I waited in horrified silence, my mind reeling from potential possibilities. “He fed me blood. His blood. Demon blood.”

He fed demon blood to a bunch of infants? Why? For what purpose? As I stared at him, I realised… It had something to do with the psychic powers they’d developed. Sam’s premonitions, the super strength that guy Jake had and that other guy… the one with the mind control… They’d been fed a demon’s blood as a baby and that made them psychic somehow?

“The powers?” I whispered. “That’s how he gave you them? With blood? That’s sick…”

He bit his lip and stopped looking at me, casting his eyes down at the place where our two legs touched. He was so ashamed, but it wasn’t his fault. He had been a baby. He hadn’t wanted or asked to be fed that blood.

“It’s not your fault,” I said, firmly, but still keeping my voice low. “You were just a baby.”

But he shook his head, still unable to look at me. “No. It’s still there. It’s still in me. Right now. I’ve got demon blood in me, Ellie. I’m a monster.”


	46. Chapter 45: Bait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What kind of bait do you use to reel in a vampire?

“I’ve got demon blood in me, Ellie. I’m a monster.”

Sam had been pressed right up close to me to tell me this, saying it directly into my ear. It was like he didn’t want the sound waves to hit the air around us, where they might float off anywhere, exposing his secret. Maybe saying it out loud would make it too real. I didn’t know. All I knew was that he immediately shrank away from me. That seems like a weird word to use for a man of Sam’s stature, but he really did get smaller. He stopped touching me, scooted aside on the mattress and seemed to fold himself up as much as he could. Maybe consciously, maybe not. But it was obvious that he didn’t want to be near me anymore. Or more likely, he thought I wouldn’t want to be near him.

I didn’t know what to say, but maybe actions would be more effective anyway. If he thought he was a monster and that I wouldn’t want to touch him, then maybe I ought to get closer to him, show him I was not afraid or disgusted, and take a little time to figure out what I was going to say.

He was still just close enough to me that I could reach out and grab his hand. His eyes narrowed slightly and he got that confused little crinkle in the middle of his forehead as he tried to figure out what I was doing. Using his solid bulk as an anchor, I was able to pull myself onto my knees so I could slide over and get both my arms around him. My fingertips only just met in the middle of his back. At first he seemed kind of rigid, but then he leant into me a little.

I held him for a few seconds, feeling his sharp shallow breathing all around me, and trying to frame my words so I could get them right first try. Finally, I pulled out of the hug, propped myself up a little higher and kissed his cheek.

“You’re not a monster,” I said, taking his hand again. “No way.”

“But it’s in me,” he whispered.

I didn’t want to tell him his feelings were wrong. This wasn’t a situation to just say “you are silly and how you’re feeling is incorrect”. I didn’t believe a little demon blood changed who he was, but he needed reassurance, not to be pushed away. If I just said he was wrong, he wouldn’t want to talk to me about it anymore. He needed to be heard, not told.

“Well… Can you feel it’s there?” I asked. “Can you tell?”

He was looking down at my hand in his, as he licked his bottom lip. “Uh… I think maybe I can. Ellie… do you remember when we were little? How I used to feel like something was wrong with me? Something bad?”

When I thought about it, I kind of did remember that. Not that it was something we ever talked about at length. But sometimes he’d say things. Just little things. Like the time he’d been crying that his father didn’t want him around, and he knew it was because he was bad, but when I asked him why he was bad he didn’t know. Once I was being a Princess and I wanted him to be a Knight and he said that Knights were brave and pure and he couldn’t be like that, so I let him be the dragon instead. He must have been twelve or thirteen when Dean called him a freak, and I’d tried to tell him that he just said it because Sam had spent three days with a book I’d leant him. But he’d insisted Dean meant something else, and wouldn’t tell me what it was.

“Sort of,” I said.

“I’ve just… I’ve always known there was something wrong with me. Something rotten, really deep inside me and nothing I did could ever make it go away.”

I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. How could he believe that? He was the kindest person I knew. He invariably did the right thing, and he was so selfless. Even in the littlest things like getting me the best pillow. The only reason he ever slept in a bed was that I flatly refused to let him take the floor of sofa. He’d given up his life to help his brother and get back into hunting, and he never ever talked about that or complained.

But… if he was that convinced there was something evil about him, what good would it do to tell him he was wrong? He’d just write me off as not understanding.

“I… well… I don’t think what’s in your blood makes you a bad person… You try really hard to be a good person, and you succeed. That’s important, too.”

He was still looking down at our hands, his thumb was almost as long as one of my fingers. He rubbed little circles on the back of my hand, over and over, maybe to calm himself, or maybe just so he could have something to focus his eyes on. He obviously didn’t want to look at my face. I wished he would. He’d have to be able to see how much I loved him, demon blood or not.

“I keep trying, Ellie… but it always just seems like monsters can’t stop being monsters…”

“They can!” I said. “We couldn’t help Lucy, but remember that vampire you met last year? You said she lived on cow’s blood and even Dean agreed to let her go.”

He looked up at me, and I could see the tiny flicker of hope in his face. “Yeah. Lenore… Yeah…”

I smiled at him but he couldn’t keep looking at me, and he focused on our hands again. I slid closer to him, and put my other arm around his back. “Well, she’s full monster, Sam. You’ve just got a little bit of demon blood inside you. You’re still human. So if she can be good, why can’t you?”

He stopped tracing the circles, and busied himself looking at my fingers, stretching them out and examining them. There was no telling what he was thinking about them, or even if he took in anything at all. Seemed like it was just something for his hand to do. I let a minute or so pass, but he still didn’t answer me.

“Well… it’s good you told me,” I said. “Maybe I can help you? If you need me…”

He looked up again. “You’re not worried I’ll hurt you? What if I can’t control it, and it lashes out somehow?”

I shook my head. “No. Never.”

He sighed, letting go of my hand. “How can you know that?”

“Because you’re a good person,” I told him, putting my newly freed arm around to hug him again. “And I don’t believe anything, not even this, could  _ever_  make you hurt me. Even if it could, I know you’d stop it somehow. You’d tell me to leave, or do something to stop yourself before it happened.”

I was kind of talking into his shoulder, but I tried to speak clearly enough and he seemed to understand me okay. His arms went around me too, and he leant down, planting a soft kiss in my hair.

“If I can even be half as good as you think I am, Ellie, I’ll be more than I ever thought I could.”

Maybe Sam couldn’t see what I did, but he didn’t need to. That long, dark time when we didn’t know each other was over. I was finally back with my best friend, where I belonged, and he didn’t need to believe he was good. Because I believed. I more than believed it. I knew it was true, and I’d be there to remind him, every single day, until he knew it too.

* * *

Sam went to bed not long after, and I fell asleep on the musty mattress. Nobody woke me in the morning. I opened my eyes of my own accord, and saw Dean sitting at the table, cleaning his guns. Sam was on the sofa, reading the book I’d bought him in Atlantic City. I reached out for my cell phone, and checked the time. Eight-thirty. Quite a late start, but there wasn’t much we could do. Lucy had said the guy who turned her picked her up at a club, and there was no point casing the place until night.

“Afternoon, Princess,” Dean smirked.

I just pulled a face at him and got my hair out of my eyes. It was shorter, but still had a mind of its own. It had responded to my cutting it by becoming even more wayward, out of some kind of protest.

There was coffee waiting for me on the table, and it had cooled down, but that just made it easier to drink. I thanked Sam for getting it and sat down next to Dean so I could drink, putting my feet on the table and nudging one of the pistols aside with my toe. Another gun in two pieces in his hands, he stopped to look at me. I just gave him a pleasant smile and took another sip of my coffee.

“You know you’re kind of brat, right?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I’m delightful!”

Dean got back to work with a snort. “Yeah. You’re a pleasure to be around.”

“Of course I am! Right, Sam?”

“You’re a ray of sunshine,” he said with a smile, before looking back down at his book.

I poked my tongue out at Dean. “See!”

We each did our thing in a pleasant silence. Dean cleaned his guns way more often than necessary, and I always suspected it was a way of distracting himself. He seemed to do it when he was worried about something. Maybe he found it soothing, somehow. Meanwhile, Sam was quite absorbed in his book, which gave me a happy feeling, since I’d chosen it for him. I finished off my coffee, speculating about what might be on Dean’s mind. Had he overheard any part of my conversation with Sam the night before? Or was it just the case and what had happened to poor Lucy? Something else, even? He only had seven months left and that had to bother him, however much Sam worried it didn’t.

Once I’d finished my coffee, I got up, grabbing Dean’s empty cup too. I’d tried to develop the habit of cleaning up as I went, to make being squeezed three to a room a little more pleasant.

“So… what’s the plan?” I asked, putting both cups in the plastic bag I’d attached to the door. Our gross motel room had no trashcan. “Are we gonna wait until night, or check out some possible nests today, while it’s still sleepy time for fangs?”

“Figure we may as well check out some warehouses down in that dock area,” Dean said. “Might get lucky.”

Sam gave a derisive sort of snort from the sofa. “Yeah. Lucky. That’s us.”

He was doing a pretty good job of appearing calm and relaxed, but there was no way Sam had stopped thinking about the night before. He’d been convinced there was something inherently wrong and evil about him his whole life. Now he knew he had actual demon blood in his veins, he must have had it on his mind constantly.

I’d promised to keep reminding him he was good, so I figured I’d start right then. Dean didn’t have to know what I really meant. Sam would.

“Just gotta think positive!” I said. “Believe in yourself and hope for the best!” On my way past, I leant over the back of the sofa, ambushing him from behind to kiss his cheek and ruffle his hair.

As I went into the bathroom to fix my own hair, I heard Dean grumble at him. “ _Too much_  freakin’ sunshine, Sam.”

* * *

No amount of positive thinking turned up a nest that day. We stuck together for a while, then tried splitting up, looking through warehouses in the dock area. We stopped when it began to get dark, figuring it was better to go back to the motel, have an early meal and then head for this club, “Spider”.

We sat around the table, eating Chinese out of the boxes.

“How smart is this guy?” I asked. “How many times will he go to the same place? Sooner or later, people are gonna be on their guard, right?”

“Going back a fourth time does seem kinda stupid. But hey, fangs ain’t the brightest, and we got nowhere else to look,” said Dean.

“So… what’s the plan?” I started collecting the containers from the table, taking Sam’s straight out of his hand before he could even put it down.

“Go to the club, look out for a possible vampire and wait until he leaves with a girl?” asked Sam. “Does he have a type?”

“Not really,” I said. “Lucy was a blonde, and so was one of the other girls, but the first one had dark hair. All youngish, I guess. Under thirty.”

Dean was looking me up and down while I stuffed all the garbage into the plastic bag. “So he’s looking for party girls in their twenties? Short skirts, flirty, out for a good time… Sexy…”

Not that I objected to dressing up pretty and getting a little attention. I liked that part. But I’d been bait before. Once it had ended with a shapeshifter trying get into my underwear and another time I’d had to scream like a helpless Damsel in Distress for well over ten minutes and that was so not my style. This time, the consequences of a screw-up were potentially being turned into a vampire. I wasn’t thrilled about that possibility. But… I wanted to do the job and when you’re hunting, you use the assets you have. If our vamp was looking for girls for his new nest, it made total sense to bait him so we could get him outside that club and gank him. Dean’s plan was good and I knew it. But that skirt was so binding!

I sighed. “I’ll get the skirt.”

* * *

It took me about twenty minutes to get the right look. I tried to remember what Lucy had been doing with her clothes and makeup. Just casual, fun night out with friends, sort of flirty, maybe looking to pick up but not trying too hard. That seemed like the right kind of vibe. I wanted to be a girl with a good job and a happy home life, but who also enjoyed a bit of recreational drug use on the weekends. On the plus side, I was definitely going to get to drink fruity drinks with umbrellas in! Those were totally this girl’s thing.

We parked near as we could to the club and I went in first. No way was the girl I was supposed to be hanging around with two guys who dressed as scruffy as Sam and Dean. The boys really ought to have got themselves some convincing nightclub outfits. A nice shirt and a good pair of jeans and they’d look at home anywhere. Mind you, in the right clothes, they’d probably attract so much female attention they’d never be able to move, let alone hunt.

In any case, I didn’t want to look like a girl who had tall, tough, male friends with her. I needed to be alone, defenceless and an easy target. Our fanged friend didn’t need to know I had been state champion in karate for most of my childhood, and was carrying a switchblade in my bra. I was not that girl at all. I was a medical receptionist, recovering from a crappy week of work and looking for a little pick me up.

An old warehouse was a good place to build a club. They’d put in a large bar and a place for the DJ. There were high tables with stools, but also couches. Lots of dark corners and plenty of space to dance. It was crowded, but not packed. Everyone had personal space, unless they didn’t want it.

Looking around as I headed to the bar, I recited Lucy’s description back over to myself in my head. About thirty, brown hair and a leather jacket. That was all I had, and there was no telling if he’d wear the jacket again… Looking out for brown haired guys of about thirty was pointless! He was called Dixon or Deacon or something like that, but he might not use the same name twice. The only really helpful thing I had was that he’d bought drinks for Lucy. So, if I stayed by the bar, he might do the same for me.

About two feet from the bar, I felt a hand on the small of my back. Surely I hadn’t found him that quickly! But looking to my side, I noticed the guy leaning into me was blonde.

“Hey swee…”

“Nope,” I said, side-stepping away from his touch.

He called after me that I was a bitch, but I ignored it, grabbing myself a stool at the bar and jumping up. It was a good vantage point. I could see the whole club, including Sam and Dean, just entering. There was another stool free beside me, should any thirty-year old brunettes feel like sitting down and buying me some fruity drinks. Plus, I was visible from the dance floor and the lounge area, so anyone scoping the place for girls by themselves would see me.

Of course the downside was that  _anyone_  looking for a lone girl would see me, and as I had just realised, vampires looking for a new nest are not the only guys fitting that description.

There were four bartenders serving along the whole length of the room, and the one nearest to me came over pretty much right away. She was cute. Kinda short, with wavy blonde hair pinned up in a ponytail. Stubby nose, turned up just a little, and eyes like shards of blue ice. She flashed me a smile that filled me up with rainbows, and I elevated her from cute to gorgeous.

She had a mild Southern accent, like she’d spent a few years down south during her childhood. Damn… “What can I get for ya, darlin’?”

A hand fan, for a start. Was it getting hot? It seemed kinda hot.

“Uh… Um…” I stuttered, forgetting how to use my words while she waited, still politely smiling. “Pina Colada?” That was a real drink, right?

“Sure thing,” she said, wandering off to fetch the right ingredients.

I gave myself a mental slap. Now was not the time to be getting all tongue tied over pretty girls! I swivelled around on the stool, so I could look back out at the club again. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, dancing, laughing, talking… not talking but getting a good workout for the mouth anyhow, over on the little sofas in the back corner.

I looked for the combo of leather jacket and brown hair but didn’t spot anyone immediately. There was a guy about the right age nearby. He was more of a dirty blonde, but I could see why someone would call that hair brown. He was chatting with two very tall women, both of whom wearing high heels that they really didn’t need. They towered over the guy. It might have been him, but there was no real reason to think it was.

There was a tap on my shoulder. The cute bartender with my drink. I tried not to blush as I reached into my bra for the bills to pay her.

“Smart,” she said, with another rainbow smile. “No one’s robbing you.”

She took her money and I took my drink, turning back around to search for prey. My boys had taken a seat down the other end of the bar, doing their best to look casual, but taking it in turns to look over at me. They were probably more concerned about this plan than I was, really. If I got turned into a vampire while acting as bait, my father would skin them alive, with just his words.

I had spotted a couple of potential candidates, but at that time of year, and in that crowd, leather jackets were not exactly a unique fashion statement. A few of the guys I was eyeing had them. I was almost finished my drink when one of them started moving towards me.

He had a round sort of face, a bit of stubble. Kind of cute, definitely someone I wouldn’t ignore if he came up to me on a night off. Given he was about thirty, had brown hair and was wearing a leather jacket, I didn’t hesitate to make eye contact. He gave a little smile as he sat down on the stool beside me.

“So, you like getting caught in the rain, too?” he asked, pointing to my drink.

I wasn’t faking when I laughed. Pina coladas and getting caught in the rain! Funny…

“Wow. That wasn’t even a pity laugh,” he said, holding out a hand. “I’m Dixon.”

Dixon! What were the chances that was a coincidence? Pretty slim, I guessed.

“I’m Ellie,” I said, realising I was holding my glass in my right hand. I did a kind of awkward switch over so I could shake his hand. I had never been particularly smooth. That was why I always went the direct approach. Seduction was not my thing.

Fortunately, it seemed to be his. “I’ve got to say, Ellie, I think it’s pretty weird you’ve been sitting here ten minutes and I’m the first guy to come and sit with you.”

I tried to insert the appropriate level of giggle. Flirty and flattered. “Why is that weird?”

“Just seems like a girl as pretty as you should be getting more attention.”

I might have thought it was flattering if I hadn’t heard exactly that kind of line before from the worst sleazes and assholes of my past. But I wasn’t me. I was a medical receptionist with less cynicism about men. So I smiled.

“Maybe they could all tell I was waiting for you.”


	47. Chapter 46: Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite Ellie doing a great job, the vampire-baiting plan goes spectacularly wrong

There was an inherent flaw in our plan. In order to win Dixon’s trust, I needed to let him keep buying me drinks. But the drunker he got me, the more unsafe the whole thing was getting. After four cocktails, I was feeling kind of lightheaded. Sure, the boys had my back, but that wasn’t something I wanted to be relying on. If it came down to it, I had to be able to run before this creep could get any of his blood into my mouth. I’d been watching each of my drinks intensely, terrified he’d try just slipping the dose in while I wasn’t looking.

I knew I’d have to start escalating things. I was confident he hadn’t made me as a hunter. He would surely have either backed off or attacked by now. I’d given mostly honest answers about who I was and where I came from and my family, knowing that with a few drinks in me, it would get harder to keep my story straight. He’d sat with me for an hour, liquoring me up and making small talk. But he hadn’t offered me drugs. I was convinced he was the guy, but was I really one hundred percent sure? I’d considered luring him out into the alley with the promise of sex, but there was still that tiniest of risks that he was an ordinary sleaze. If he didn’t actually try to give me the blood, how could I be certain I wasn’t letting Sam and Dean decapitate a human?

“You want another drink?” he asked, moving some of my hair away from my face in a way that would have made me feel sick whether he was a vampire or not. I didn’t want him touching any part of me.

I turned and leaned in closer to him. “Maybe… I dunno…”

“Live a little,” he said. “You had a bad week. You’ve earned it.” I’d told him all about my fake job and how the computer system had gone down and patients were angry and then my boss had yelled at me.

Leaning in closer still, I shook my head. “Yeah… that’s why I was hoping for a different kind of buzz tonight…”

He winked at me. Unless he knew I was playing him, he must have thought he’d hit the jackpot. I’d let him get me drunk and then asked him for drugs. He didn’t even need to try. “I might have a little something…”

I gave my best surprised and excited face. “E?” Because that’s what you’d expect someone to give you right? At a club, you’d assume someone would have Ecstasy…

“Something new,” he said. “I haven’t got much, but we’re friends, right? You want to give it a try?”

“What does it do?” I asked. “Will I go up?”

“Baby, you won’t ever come down. You’ve never had anything like this before, I promise.”

I looked around, making sure I caught Dean’s eye as I pretended to be cautiously checking out the club. Then I leant back to get near Dixon, so I could whisper. “Not here. My friend Bela says cops come here.”

“Maybe I’m a cop,” he joked.

I laughed. “Maybe I am. Come on… Let’s go outside.”

“I just need to drop it in your drink,” he said. Shit… he wasn’t going to follow me…

Sticking to the nervous act, I started playing with the hem of my skirt. His eyes followed my hands as I lifted my skirt a little and fidgeted. “I just… I don’t wanna stay here, you know… When I get high, I get a little… uh… needy.”

“Needy?” he asked, still watching my fingers fumble, as my skirt rode up a touch further.

I took a deep breath, hoping my disgust would play off as anxiety, and slid a hand off my own lap and onto his. “You know… Needy…”

Realisation dawned and it was like all his dreams had come true. He was going to get me for his nest, and there’d be sex in into the bargain. His hand covered mine and he started to stand up. “Well, I guess you’ll want a little privacy. We can head out back…”

I let him lead me through the crowd, past Sam and Dean and out the door. This was the moment. I pretended to adjust my bra strap, while feeling for my knife. There was no way I could decapitate him with that little thing, but maybe with a few kicks to the groin and head I could keep him away long enough for my backup to arrive.

I stumbled a little on my way out of the club, and he threw an arm around my waist. Jesus, I really was pretty drunk. They put some strong shit in those fruity cocktails.

Before I had a chance to see whether the boys had followed, he was leading me around the corner and into a much narrower alleyway.

He guided me towards the wall, surprisingly gently, his hands on my hips. When he had my back against the wall, he lifted one off so he could move my hair out of the way again. I tried to breathe normal when he started kissing my neck. I just focused on the fact that he wasn’t going to bite me… probably… He didn’t want to drink from me, he just wanted to turn me and he surely wouldn’t risk freaking me out after investing an hour in seducing me, right?

God, I hoped so, as I felt his lips travel down towards my shoulder. He was actually very soft and oddly respectful. If I hadn’t known what he was, I might have been into to it. He wasn’t all grabbing and grinding like most of the guys I picked up in bars. He seemed to be going for romantic rather than sexual.

That’s when I remembered that vampires mate for life. Uh uh, asshole! No fucking way!

At least he couldn’t see my face. I took a little breath in and stroked my hands up his chest. The way he moved against me when I did gave me more feeling of control, so I was able to giggle. “Wait… what was that thing you wanted me to try?”

He kissed me one more time and with his left hand still on my hip, he went into his pocket with the other hand. Out came a little plastic bottle, filled with a thick red liquid. I had seen blood more than enough times to recognise it. This was it, one hundred percent confirmation that I’d got the right man. So where the hell were Sam and Dean?

I had to keep the act up, so I gave an excited squeak. “Ooh. It’s so pretty!”

He put the bottle into his left hand, letting that arm snake all the way around my waist. With it held in place, he was able to unscrew the dropper cap, and draw some blood up into it.

“You ready, sweetie? I promise, one drop of this and you’ll never be the same.”

I had maximum ten seconds left. His arm tightened around my waist, he lifted the dropper up above me and I was just about to knee him in the groin and run for it, when bangs echoed in the alley, the sound bouncing off the tin walls of warehouses on all sides. It sounded like gunfire. Not just a few shots, either, a whole hail of bullets.

Genuinely startled, I jumped a little. Dixon was obviously taken by surprise too, but he recovered quicker than I did. He had lost a drop of blood when he squeezed the dropper in surprise, but there was plenty more.

“What was that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Come on, open your mouth.”

Something was very wrong. The guys hadn’t come, someone had rapidly fired a gun nearby. I was going to have to deal with this myself.

He was still pressed quite up close to me, one arm around me, but with the hand not gripping. He still needed to hold the bottle. There probably wasn’t room to get my knee into him, so I acted on instinct and shoved him as hard as I could. He dropped the bottle and the dropper as he stumbled. Before he could recover sufficiently to retaliate, I dealt him a kick to the head.

He fell down, but wasn’t injured. Still, the time it took him to get back up was time for me to grab the knife out of my bra and flick the blade out. Back on his feet, he grinned at me.

“Hunter?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. You’re good. I mean… stupid, no back up. But you had me fooled.”

He bared his fangs as he stepped towards me and I brandished my knife, weighting it carefully. With a good one-two punch, I could get it into his gut. More bangs: what sounded like another round of gunfire, and I was distracted long enough for him to leap at me. I thrust with my knife and he put a hand up to defend himself, getting a nasty gash across his palm. I followed that up with a heavy kick to the stomach and he was propelled across the alley.

What was with the gunfire? And why weren’t Sam and Dean here? And please God don’t let the two answers be the same.

Bringing a knife to a vampire fight is maybe not ideal, but I gripped it anyway as he started to charge back at me. Sam gave me that knife, because I liked pink and he was worried about me never carrying a gun. It felt like having Sam with me, a little. Actual Sam would have been a great deal more helpful, but the knife was all I had and it would have to do.

I didn’t even use it, punching with my left hand instead, but it glanced off and was not quite hard enough to get my attacker away. I was adrenalin-fuelled but I was still drunk. I shouldn’t have gone for the face. The chest and stomach had a much larger surface area and were easier to hit. He responded by throwing a punch to my jaw and grabbing my left arm. I kicked and flailed out with my knife, adding a loud scream. I only screamed out of fear, but maybe it would distract him a little.

It did, but not enough, and I was soon on the ground, Dixon straddling me with one knee on each side of my stomach. I was dizzy from drink and the hit to my head, and I couldn’t quite remember how I’d hit the ground. My knife was still in my hand though, and I squeezed it, trying to think. I could probably stab it into his leg, but then what? Don’t act too quick, Ellie. Think and plan.

He smiled, holding up his cut and bloodied hand. “Well, how about that. All it takes is one drop, and you opened up an artery.”

I didn’t have time to plan! Realising what he was about to do I closed my mouth tight, biting my bottom lip as hard as I could without drawing blood. What if he just got his blood on my lips? Would that be enough to turn me?

“This is actually better,” said Dixon. “Turning clueless girls is one thing, but you…” He reached for my mouth, and I felt the blood dripping from his palm onto my face. “We’re going to be so great together.”

Not a chance! While he’d been talking, I had adjusted the knife in my palm and now I flung my hand upwards with all the power in my arm, plunging the knife deep into the flesh of his thigh. He cried out in pain, but I held onto the knife, trying to pull it back out as he lost his balance and almost fell on top of me.

I felt the blade snap and the weight of him was pulled off me. Sam had arrived, well behind schedule and long after I needed him. He grabbed my left hand, and kept running, panic across his face. “Come on!”

“What’s happening?” I asked, still clutching the handle of my knife. “Where’s Dean?”

“Run!” was his only answer.

 

* * *

 

Sam ran with me three whole blocks, never letting go of my hand and never slowing down. His legs were so much longer than mine and I just couldn’t keep up with him anymore. I was drunk and dizzy and had been hit in the head, and was possibly turning into a vampire. I collapsed.

We were down by the river, where the warehouses and underground club scene began. There were a lot of cars parked, and a few people headed out to party. They were probably staring at us, but nobody stopped. As soon as I wasn’t gripping his hand anymore, Sam noticed, and turned quick enough to catch me as I fell down.

“Ellie? Crap… Are you okay? Here…”

He lay me down flat on the sidewalk and put a hand to my forehead. He had to move my damn hair out of the way. His big, flat palm covered most of my face, but he was gentle. His other hand petted my hair a little, which felt nice.

I had to struggle to talk, gasping for enough oxygen just to keep my lungs running. Finally, I was able to tell him “Just… exhausted.” I thought for a moment. “And… drunk.”

He smiled, but it was full of concern. “Okay. I think we’re safe. Just rest a minute.”

“Dean?” I asked.

Sam was looking over his shoulder and back the way we had come, but he turned to look at me again. “He… Dean drew their fire so I could run.”

Of course he did. That was a classic Dean move.

Well, that definitely meant that the gunfire I had heard was directed at the boys. The whole night was a total catastrophe. I was quietly resentful about that, because frankly, I had done a great job. This didn’t seem like something it was appropriate to complain about though, what with Dean last seen deliberately distracting a gunman.

“Who… who…” I couldn’t even remember the appropriate words.

“Jesus, Ellie! There’s blood on your face… That’s not his, is it?”

I nodded. _Please don’t let it be near my mouth, please!_

But it was. He used his thumb to wipe at a spot right near the corner of my mouth and then another just below my bottom lip. I hadn’t tasted any in my mouth but everything had happened so fast and I was half drunk and all scared and I didn’t know what was going on, really. Without any warning, I just started to cry.

“I don’t… wanna… turn, Sam!”

He was done wiping the blood off, but his hand was still on my cheek. “I know… I’m… Ellie, I’m so sorry we weren’t there.”

Just as I’d started breathing properly, my breaths were interrupted again, by the loud, desperate sobbing. Sometimes I think I cry too much, but this wasn’t one of those times. I had every right to bawl my eyes out. I was going to be a vampire. They’d have to kill me, straight off with my head, just like Lucy.

“When?” I sobbed.

“What?” Sam’s petting of my hair had become almost frantic now, like he could somehow get the vampire out of me by wishing hard enough.

“When will it happen?”

“I… I don’t know. Maybe an hour and we’ll know…”

“I don’t… please don’t let me…”

“You said you’d help me, remember,” he said. “Stop me from become something bad… I’ll help you too. I promise.”

“Even if you gotta…” I couldn’t say it.

Sam swallowed, and I remembered that he’d been there before. He’d had to do it, and that had been someone he maybe hadn’t known as well as me, but she had meant more to him. “Even if I’ve gotta kill you.”

 

* * *

 

Once I could stand, he helped me up and got me to a crappy looking sedan parked in a secluded alley. I was too out of it to hotwire, but he was almost as good at it, and we were able to drive it back to the motel. We wanted to leave the Impala so Dean could get away. The thought that Dean wouldn’t get away was too terrifying.

On the ride back, he gave me the basics. They’d followed me and Dixon out of the club, and as they’d made to go around the corner after us, they’d run into some old friends. Gordon Walker and a guy known only as Kubrick. They’d both tried to kill Sam within the previous year, and apparently they were at it again. Kubrick I had never met, but I knew he was known for his religious fervour. Gordon, on the other hand, I’d met a bunch of times. He had once frequented the Roadhouse, until Ellen banned him for life.

There were two major events that had informed my opinion about him before he’d met Sam. The first was that he kinda hit on me, right after I turned eighteen, which I think anyone would agree is pretty gross. The second was that he took Jo out hunting, behind her mom’s back, when she was sixteen. He said he was teaching her, but he used her as Rawhead bait. She didn’t see it that way, thought it was all a big overreaction, but Aunt Ellen knows what’s what and I believed her interpretation. Man, Jo was pissed I wouldn’t take her side.

Anyway, I already thought he was kind of an asshole. But then he’d tried to kill Sam, spouting a bunch of crap about how he was a psychic demon hell soldier or whatever and that he had opened the hell-gate on purpose. He was clearly crazy, but that didn’t excuse trying to hurt Sam, in my opinion. And now, his lunatic vendetta had probably gotten me turned into a vampire. Maybe I shouldn’t let Sam kill me straight away. Maybe I ought to rip Gordon’s throat out first. I could do that, right? With my new fangs?

When Dean showed up at the motel, I was lying on the mattress with my legs elevated, while Sam paced the room. He’d called Dean several times, but there was no answer. We were waiting… for Dean, and to see if I started to crave blood.

Dean burst in, totally casual. He glanced down at me, raising an eyebrow, and smiled at Sam, like nothing was wrong.

“There you are!” Sam cried, half his worries gone.

“Yeah, sorry. I stopped for a slice,” said Dean. I knew that was a lie.

“Nice move you pulled back there, Dean! Running right at the weapons!”

“What can I say? I’m a bad-ass!” He winked at me. “What’s wrong with you?”

“His blood got on her _face_ , Dean! Maybe in her mouth! Ellie might get turned because we weren’t there.”

Dean could no longer pretend to be unconcerned. “Son of a bitch. How long has it been?”

“Forty-five minutes,” Sam said. “I think she’s okay, but I don’t… I can’t be sure.”

Kneeling down on the mattress beside me, Dean put a hand to my forehead like his brother had, and stared into my pupils. “How do you feel, sweetheart? Headache?”

I nodded. “But I’m kinda drunk. Plus he hit me in the head, so it might just be that.”

“You hungry?”

If anything, I was nauseous. I was pretty sure I’d vomit if someone showed me food. But maybe I just didn’t want food anymore. Maybe I wanted blood. I shook my head.

Maybe it was just the alcohol in my system, or the wooziness, but it was kinda nice having Dean lean into me and touch my face so tenderly. I was used to that kind of care and attention from Sam, but not from his brother.

“I think you’re gonna be okay.” He leant in and kissed my forehead, which was possibly the nicest thing to ever happen to me. “You were awesome, by the way. Irresistible vampire bait.”

He gave me two quick pats on the knee and stood back up, looking from me to Sam. “So, Sam… Gordon’s out of jail.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Sam said. “You know… how the hell did he know where to find us?”

Dean considered this for a moment as he leant against the wall. Then a look of realisation spread across his face. “That bitch.” Pulling out his cell phone, he dialled, and Sam seemed to clue in too. He shook his head, pulling his angriest scowl. Who? What bitch?

“Hi Bela,” said Dean, and then I remembered. She’d called him the night before, as we were getting ready to go vampire hunting. Just to say thanks again for our help. Which should have been suspicious as it was, but she’d also had an uncharacteristically friendly chat, asking Dean where we were.

“Question for you,” he said. “When you called me yesterday, it wasn’t to thank me for saving your ass, was it?” He paused as she made some kind of response. “Excuse me?” Whatever she said made him angry. “I don’t know, maybe pick up the phone and tell us that a raging psychopath was dropping by!” There was another pause. “He tried to kill us!” The next break was much longer, and I thought maybe Bela was apologising. But apparently not. “There were two of us! And two of them! Bela, if we make it out of this alive, the first thing I’m gonna do is kill you.”

There was one final pause while he let her speak. Then he decided he’d had enough of her crap. “Listen to my voice and tell me if I’m serious.” He hung up the call, and let out a frustrated groan as he put his cell phone back in his pocket. “Unbelievable!”

“So what do we do?” I asked, from my mattress. “I mean… sooner or later, they’re gonna find us here, right?”

Dean was studying his machete carefully, examining it like some kind of machete expert, checking for flaws. I wondered if he was thinking of Gordon, or Bela. Or even Dixon, since my situation had made the hunt pretty personal at this point. Sam had stopped pacing, and come back to sit on the mattress with me again.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll worry about Gordon, you just relax, okay?”

“I can’t relax, Sam! I might be a vampire and crazy guys are trying to murder you!”

“Maybe you can be one of those cow vampires, Ellie,” Dean said, and I appreciated his attempt to find an upside, but it wasn’t really reassuring. “You could just stick to red meat unless we need you to fang up and slaughter our enemies.”

That did make me smile. It sounded kind of like a book or a movie. A friendly girl vampire who hunts other vampires with a hunky pair of human brothers. We’d definitely need some kind of love triangle.

“You’re not gonna turn,” Sam said. “It’s been nearly an hour and I’m sure we’d know by now.”

“You said you weren’t sure before,” I reminded him.

“Well, I’m sure now. It’ll be okay.”

“I bet my dad knows how long it takes someone to turn,” I said, thinking aloud.

Dean looked horrified. “Do _you_ wanna tell him why we’re asking?”

I shuddered. Sam and Dean would be swiftly executed, and vampire or not, I’d be put in the basement panic room for the rest of my days. Dean was right. We definitely didn’t want to bring my father into this. All we could do was wait, while loading up our guns, and trying to figure out what to do about Gordon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is exciting! It's the first time I've gone dramatically off book. But as I was writing I realised that Gordon's presence makes the plan go slight awry in the original episode, but now Ellie is acting as bait, there's potential for far more spectacular disaster. But let's be clear... Ellie did a fine job and in no way fucked it up. I firmly believe she could have finished him off if Sam had given her the chance. She'll be sure to bring that grievance up at a more appropriate time.


	48. Chapter 47: Turned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Ellie and the boys go looking for Gordon, they find someone who probably frightens Ellie even more.

I started to get very drowsy, and Sam worried. Even if it wasn’t a symptom of impending vampirism, I might have had a concussion. I tried to stay awake, but I just kept drifting off, until finally Dean took a close look in my eyes and made me tell him my name and what day it was and how many fingers. He declared I wasn’t concussed or turning into a vampire.

“She’s just drunk off her ass,” he concluded.

They stopped trying to keep me awake and so I must have eventually dozed off.

Waking up was as slow as falling asleep. I drifted towards consciousness, vaguely aware of the sounds around me. Footsteps, a far off siren, the scrape of metal and talking. The boys weren’t whispering, but they were keeping it hushed, possibly because I was sleeping.

“…look after herself.” Those were the first words I could make out properly, and they came from Dean.

“I know that. I’m the one that keeps telling _you_.” Sam sounded agitated.

I rolled over and opened my eyes. They’d turned off the lights near me, and it seemed like it was still dark out. Dean sat over at the table, sharpening his machete. That was the source of the scraping sound. Sam sat beside him, cleaning a gun.

“We gotta deal with Gordon, first,” Dean said.

“Gordon can’t smell me, Dean. That vampire will track Ellie.”

“Huh?” I asked, suddenly much more with it. “What about me?”

Dean sighed. “Sam’s worried your vampire friend is gonna come looking for you, finish what he started.”

“He’s got your scent,” Sam reminded me, his face as worried as his voice.

I managed to get myself sitting upright, rubbing my eyes and beginning a battle with my hair. I actually felt a lot better. Maybe I’d slept off some of the alcohol. It didn’t seem like I was going to be turning, anyway.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Four hours?” said Sam. “We gotta find this vampire before he finds you, Ellie.”

“We can’t go out hunting until we know where Gordon is,” Dean disagreed. “He’s the bigger threat.”

I was inclined to agree. The vampire might have gotten hold of my scent, but he seemed like a reasonably rational guy. Sure, he might want revenge for the four-inch knife I snapped off in his thigh, but he was going to think his actions through. Gordon was full psycho and had opened fire on the boys in a public space where anyone might have been hurt. Fortunately, there had been no collateral damage, but there easily could have been. We could deal with Dixon later. Gordon needed to be stopped immediately.

Getting to my feet slowly, I tested to see if I was capable of standing upright again. “Agreed. We gotta deal with Gordon…” Everything seemed alright. I wasn’t falling over, the room wasn’t spinning.

“About that…” said Dean, looking at his brother. “When we find him, or if he finds us… Well… I’m just saying he’s not leaving us a whole lot of options.”

He was right. I wasn’t normally one to advocate killing a human, but this was about self-defence. Gordon would kill Sam unless we took him out first. To me, that was just an unacceptable risk. Sam didn’t even like killing monsters if he could avoid it, but surely he would see that.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “We’ve gotta kill him.”

Dean was surprised. “Really? Just like that? I thought you would have been like…” he put on a fake whiny voice that sounded nothing like Sam. “ _No. We can’t. He’s human. It’s wrong._ ”

Used to being mocked, Sam just shrugged. “No. I’m done. I mean, Gordon’s not gonna stop until we’re dead. Or till he is.”

I carefully wandered over to where the boys sat at the table. Dean had put the machete down and Sam’s gun was good to go. As I came closer, Sam pushed the third chair out with his foot, so I’d have somewhere to sit. I gave him a nod as I reached out for it.

“You’re right,” I said, to reassure them both. “This is about self-defence.”

As I sat down, Dean’s cellphone started to ring. His face broke into a scowl as soon as he looked at the caller ID. There was no indication who it was, as he picked up and put it to his ear.

“What?”

Wow. I hoped it wasn’t anyone we needed to ingratiate ourselves with! Sam looked at me, and mouthed “Bela?” He was probably right. Dean’s tone had sure sounded like the one he used to talk to her.

“You’re a hundred miles away!” he barked into the phone. “How the hell did you…”

Evidently, he was interrupted. Which seemed like something Bela would do. While Dean kept talking, Sam leant forward to take another look at my pupils, and feel my forehead.

“Yeah, you seem okay,” he said. “Feel any better?”

“Still a little out of it, but I can move and see properly and everything.”

He smiled. “Yeah. Dean’s right. You’re just drunk.”

“Thanks,” Dean was saying, and his tone had become somewhat less hostile. He kept the phone to his ear a few seconds longer, before pressing the end call button.

He stared at his phone in his hand, before looking up at Sam and me.

“So, Bela pulled a Sixth Sense and found out where Gordon is.”

“Ha!” That certainly didn’t sound like Bela, doing us a solid for no reason. “Why? She feeling guilty?”

“Like she’d admit to that,” Dean said. “So… she got us a location, but apparently her spirit friend likes giving out advice. It said we should leave town. Not go after Gordon.”

“Ominous…” muttered Sam.

None of us was the kind to listen to advice like that. If anything, Dean and I were _more_ likely to go after Gordon now we’d been told not to. I was up and grabbing my jeans to change right away. I was still wearing the undercover skirt and the time for that had definitely passed. Watching me hold my hands out to steady myself as I headed to the bathroom, Dean cleared his throat.

“Should you even be coming? I mean, no offence, but you’re kinda wobbly.”

“It’s just a few cocktails and I’m getting better. I’m fine.”

“No you’re not. You’re vulnerable.”

He wasn’t wrong. I didn’t think I’d be much help in a fight. I thought about staying.

“We can’t leave you here alone, Ellie!” Sam insisted. “What if he shows up?”

“Gordon?” asked Dean. “Good point. He’s not after you, but he’d definitely make you talk.”

I didn’t really like the sound of being left behind so a crazy man could torture my drunken ass to find out where Sam was. I wouldn’t want to tell him, but I probably would. I’d never been tortured and I had a strong suspicion I’d break real easy.

“I meant the vampire,” Sam said. “But yeah, Gordon too. You gotta come with us.”

I was coming, I was not coming, and then I was again. It was hard to keep up. In the end, I just headed into the bathroom to get changed anyway. But we finally agreed that I definitely should come, so I crawled into the back of the Impala and kept my eyes closed as we drove, to ease the nausea.

 

* * *

 

Bela’s ghost friend had described a warehouse down by the river. (Bela had ghost friends! How cool is that?! I mean, I hated her and all, but you gotta admit, that’s pretty darn cool!). It was the same general area we’d been looking for nests during the day. Dean eventually found a place that looked right. It was two stories and there was a neon sign right outside, just as Bela had told him. It seemed like maybe she’d actually come good.

I was still feeling a little light headed, but I was fine to get myself out of the car and into the warehouse. I no longer had my new knife. Thankfully, I still had the handle, and I’d been planning to replace the blade even before I’d snapped it off in a vampire’s thigh. Dean insisted on giving me a gun, even though I wasn’t confident I could shoot it. He figured my sober aim was so good that even drunk, I’d probably still hit the right general area. Praise from Dean twice in one day? Was he sick?

We went single file through a dark, narrow corridor. Sam was in front, with me in the middle and Dean close behind me. There was definitely someone or something at the other end. We could see a faint light as we got closer, but the sounds were not immediately recognisable. Someone breathing unevenly, maybe in a panic?

We finally came through into a large, open room. Obviously intended for storage originally, it was now somebody’s home. It was dimly lit by candles, but I could make out the furniture. An old Persian rug, a few comfortable chairs, mismatched like they’d come from different places. There were boxes stacked up to make tables and shelves. Everything was a little old and ragged. It had obviously been thrown together from what was unloved and unwanted, but with some creativity and a real effort.

The source of the noise, and the explanation for the décor, became apparent at the same time. Two female bodies, headless and bloody, hung from the ceiling by their wrists. Each was wearing jeans and a pretty tank. They were similar body types, and had similar style to Lucy and to me. I could bet they had both had long hair, too. Dixon had a type. It was obvious they were his other two victims. I could tell, because Dixon himself knelt in front of them, head bowed down. The uneven, laboured breathing was his. He was crying. Sobbing, even.

Though Dean and Sam couldn’t move as silently as me, even when I was tipsy, they were still very stealthy. It didn’t matter, though. He could surely smell us. Especially me, since he’d already gotten my scent once.

Since we’d been prepared for Gordon and not a vampire, we didn’t have anything handy to kill him with. There was a sharp looking knife of a reasonable size sitting on a nearby table. Dean started to move towards it, but stopped when Dixon turned around.

“He killed them…” he muttered.

Dean stopped going for the knife, but kept his gun trained on Dixon. It wouldn’t kill him, but even a vampire would get a nasty wound from a bullet and slow down some. We had spread out slightly coming into the room, but Sam now stepped back in front of me, his own gun ready. I was ready too, only with Sam in front of me I would never have got a decent shot off.

“Who killed them?” Dean asked. “Gordon?”

Dixon nodded. “I never should have brought a hunter here. Never. I just… I just wanted some kind of revenge. Stupid… exposing him to my family.”

I could almost see Dean scowl, and I was looking at the back of his head. “Oh yeah, you’re such a family man.”

Wary of the guns pointed at him, Dixon held his hands out in front of him to show he wasn’t armed. Of course, his teeth were weapons, but he was a fair distance away and he didn’t appear about to attack. All the same, I could see every muscle in Sam’s body tense.

“You don’t understand.”

Dean scoffed. “I don’t want to understand, you son of…”

“I was desperate!” Dixon said. I wouldn’t call it a shout, exactly, but his voice was definitely raised. “You ever felt desperate? I had no one… I’d lost everyone.”

“So you picked up girls and turned them?” asked Sam. “Just so you didn’t have to be alone?”

“I needed someone.” The vampire was looking around Sam, at me. “I needed a family… But I couldn’t keep them safe. Not by myself…”

“Heart breaking story,” Dean said, keeping his gun on Dixon as he moved across the room towards the two bodies. “I’m tearing up.”

Ignoring him, Dixon went on. “I thought I’d never find you. I waited so long and I got… I got impatient.” I was starting to lose track of this conversation. He got impatient looking for us? For hunters? “Tried to start a nest on my own. I should have waited for you.”

Apparently, Sam was following things a lot better than I was, because he seemed to understand. “You have got to be kidding.”

Dean had lowered his gun and was now examining the headless women in front of him. But Dixon appeared to have forgotten about them. “We can make a family. We can protect them, together.”

Realisation dawned on me all of a sudden and I had an instantaneous urge to take a shower for about nine hours. Me! He meant me! He regretted trying to make a new nest on his own because he was supposed to be waiting for me…

“What? Buddy, you have got the wrong girl!”

“No… No. You’re the right girl. I should have waited.”

“She put a four-inch blade in your leg!” Sam reminded him.

“Because she didn’t know,” Dixon insisted. “She didn’t know… But Ellie, I’ll show you. I’ll teach you and then we can start a new family. Together.”

I did not think it possible that anything could creep me out more than the threat of being turned into a vampire. But… there it was. Having a vampire want to turn you so he can make you his creepy vampire bride and start a family. That… that was on a whole new level of gross. What did that mean? Finding random young girls and turning them into vampires too? And what did he mean by “together”? Like… together?

I wanted to vomit.

“Uh…” I felt so sick and horrified that I was sort of lost for words. I mean… what do you even say? “No thankyou?”

Dean didn’t seem to be paying any attention to our conversation, now focused completely on the corpses. He turned around.

“He didn’t cut their heads off. He ripped them off… with his bare hands. What the hell did you do to Gordon?”

Still trying to get a better look at me, Dixon was creeping forward slightly, on his knees. Sam was still ready for him, though, keeping his stance even and his gun aimed.

“I’m sorry…” Dixon said, to me and only me.

“You answer him!” I told him, sternly and firmly. “What did you do?”

He hadn’t turned Gordon into a vampire had he? The guy was already dangerous enough, but all juiced up and lusting for actual blood? That was a terrifying thought.

“I had to show him. He needed to see…”

“Great…” muttered Dean. “Like he wasn’t bad enough without fangs.”

Sam was still standing in front of me, but I stepped around him, keeping my own gun trained on Dixon’s chest. He didn’t have to know I probably couldn’t fire it straight. I wanted to see what Dean was talking about for myself. I tried to avoid making eye contact with Dixon as I moved past him. He was staring at me with such an intense expression that I couldn’t really identify but I definitely did not like.

I peered at the nearest body, cautiously at first, and still trying to keep an eye on Dixon as well. Dean was right. She hadn’t been neatly decapitated with a machete the way she should have been. The poor woman had clearly had her head ripped off by someone enormously strong. This innocent woman had been turned into a vampire, held in that warehouse without any real understanding of what was going on, before being killed in possibly the most brutal way I had ever seen. And I had seen some shit.

Vampire Gordon was worse than regular Gordon, and also worse than most vampires.

“Jesus… we have to find him. Dixon, where did Gordon go?”

“I… I’m sorry…”

In my defence, he was on his knees, still kind of sobbing, and basically, he looked pathetic as hell. Plus, Sam had a gun pointed at him. So maybe I’m stupid, but hey, no one’s perfect! I was scared and creeped out by his weird desire to start a family with me. And I couldn’t help remembering that vampires mate for life. That had to be what he meant, right? But… horrifying as that thought was, maybe I could use it to my advantage.

Taking two steps forward and swallowing down my rising nausea, I put my gun on the ground as I got down to Dixon’s level. He liked me, didn’t he? He couldn’t stop staring at me. I didn’t like it, but maybe there was some sense in using that to get him to tell us what we needed to know.

“Hey, look at me,” I said. “Gordon. Where did he go?”

He did look at me. His eyes were a combination of sad and… something else. I can only describe it as intense. He stared into my face like he’d never seen a human face before.

This guy was a monster and he’d turned those women and would have done the same to me. For all his talk, it would have been for his own selfish reasons, and I don’t care how lonely you are. You can’t just force people to be your family, especially not by turning them into monsters too. And I had to kneel there and pretend like I didn’t want to be sick as he reached out towards me.

“Winchester,” said Dixon. “He just kept talking about this guy Winchester, saying he had to get him.”

“Great,” muttered Dean.

Well, we already knew he was looking for Sam. There was no reason to suppose that would change just because he was now a vampire. If he was obsessive about it as a human, of course that would carry over.

“But did he say anything about where he might look?” I asked. “We have to find him, Dixon. It’s important.”

“You’re gonna make him pay?” asked Dixon. “For what he did?”

Technically, I supposed. Since he was a vampire now, any qualm I had about killing him was gone entirely. My motives were about protecting my friend, but I didn’t mind throwing in a little revenge, too. Dixon was also owed a hefty serving of punishment, but I wasn’t going to tell him that yet.

“Yeah,” I said. “For those two girls.”

 “See… you’re going to be a great mother.” His hand reached closer and closer before resting against my cheek.

That was the final straw! The insinuations and declarations were one thing, but the second he touched me, I just freaked right the hell out. I grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand away from me.

“Okay! Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, creep! Even if you caught me, and turned me and made me a fanged freak like you, there is no way, _no way ever_ , that I am starting a family with you. Or even being in the same room with you!”

I didn’t exactly follow everything that happened after that. Maybe I was still a little drunk, or too blind with fear and rage, or maybe it all went down so fast that anyone would have been a little lost.

Dixon lunged at me, and he definitely got a hand on my neck. Sam fired five or six times, and Dean was moving, yelling something I didn’t hear. Then Sam had my wrist and we were both running back down the corridor. It only seemed like a few seconds before we were bursting through the door and into the street, neon sign flashing bright into my eyes.

Then Sam was gently, but very firmly, guiding me towards the Impala. I leant back against the rear passenger door, breathing heavy from the adrenaline and the exertion. I still felt like being sick. Why had he been looking at me that way? What had he been thinking about doing to me?

“Are you okay?” Sam asked. “Did he bite you?”

“Huh?” I asked, still stuck on the memory of his eyes staring at me. “No, he didn’t even get close…”

“Ellie, his face was on your neck. Let me look!”

I hadn’t felt anything.  Except his hand gripping my neck near the shoulder, which I now realised was because he was pulling my head down to expose the other side of my neck. To bite me. But if he got me I would have felt it, wouldn’t I?

Sam was running his fingers along my neck, looking close. I was focused on trying to get the air back into my lungs. That was stupid. What I did in there… that was dumb. It hadn’t even been any help in finding Gordon. All I’d done was lost my temper and lost control, and for no result.

“Looks like his fangs grazed you,” said Sam. “But you’re okay, right?”

“Right,” I said, my voice weak and breathy. But I wasn’t really okay. Maybe I didn’t get hurt, but I was not even close to okay. “I just…”

But before I could say any more, there was a loud bang across the street as Dean came hurtling out of the warehouse. He kept up his momentum across the street, and by the time he reached the car, he had his keys ready. Sam and I piled in while he was starting the engine and we screeched out and down the street in a haze of panic and burnt rubber.

“What the hell happened?” Sam asked.

“New rule. Always bring a machete.”

I looked out the back window. So, what Dean was saying was that Dixon was still alive? “But there was a knife…”

“Apparently, he doesn’t leave knives that can take his head lying around his house!” Dean said. Which was not surprising, really.

“So what…”

“I’ll tell you what, Ellie! Now he’s pissed off.”

On the way back to the motel, Dean calmed down enough to elaborate on what had happened. The entire clip in Sam’s gun had only slowed him down a little. He’d taken five shots to the chest before Sam grabbed me and ran. Dean had popped another two into his face before realising that it was causing him a lot of pain but not really stopping him. Then there’d been a fistfight, during which Dean had grabbed the knife. He’d gotten a nasty slice right across the neck, but it hadn’t been sharp enough to get through all the muscle and tendon, let alone the bone. So Dean had left him to bleed and ran for it, only to find the guy was still able to get himself upright and chase him.

“Hope he looks good in a scarf, cos he’s gonna have a hell of a scar.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's be real: Vampire stories have been heavily linked with sexuality and sexual metaphor for hundreds of years. Which I think is why vampires creep me out more than any other monster. I can't separate them from the symbolism, and that definitely informed the way I wrote this chapter. I find vampires really interesting and great horror villains. But creepy as fuck.


	49. Chapter 48: Damsel in Distress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is about what the title says it’s about. Almost…

It was still dark when we got back to the motel, but dawn was coming up pretty fast. I told the boys to go ahead and sleep. I’d had a few hours earlier in the night and there was no way I was sleeping again. I was too panicked. How long does it take a vampire to recover from bullet wounds and semi-decapitation? Would Dixon come after us right away?

Though the threat of Gordon barely bothered me at all, I knew I had to be prepared for the possibility that he might find us as well. While the boys slept, I sat on a dining chair, facing the barricaded door, a pistol in one hand and a machete in the other.

A woman’s screams prompted me to get out of the chair and part the curtains, to peer through the window, as I contemplated waking the guys. But she was just screaming at her boyfriend, and he started to scream back, the two hollering abuse at each other across the parking lot. Going back to my chair, I learned many things about the couple, including that he was sleeping with someone called Carol and that she always got her mother involved in everything. He was sick of her brother sponging off them, and she thought they’d have more money if he had taken that job with his cousin. It went on for nearly an hour and I felt like busting out there and doing a little impromptu mediation. It sounded like they both had legitimate grievances, and they definitely needed to find some way to communicate that didn’t involve screaming across a motel parking lot at 5am. She said something about them being together eight years, so clearly they’d been trying to make it work.

As I sat there, gripping my weaponry and listening to them, I contemplated their lives. Dad had always said that’s what he wanted for me. A normal life. Maybe I wouldn’t be the target of angry vampires, but everyone has their problems, don’t they? What’s to say my life was any worse than the pair outside? He couldn’t hold down a job and that sounded pretty stressful. At least I had money to live off, even if I didn’t always come upon it through strictly honest means. And anyway, I could kill my problems, but the guy outside was always going to have the fear about where his next paycheck would come from. Then there were their romantic problems. The cheating and the fact she didn’t make him feel needed anymore, whatever that means. I’d had my fair share of romantic disaster and none of it had anything to do with hunting. That was entirely about me being unattractive on all possible levels, and living the normal life my dad had always planned for me wasn’t going to fix that.

I liked hunting. I liked helping people. I liked roadtripping and I liked Sam and Dean. So, yeah, maybe right then and there I was petrified of a vampire sniffing me out, but that didn’t mean I’d made the wrong choices in life. I was okay. Wasn’t I?

Thinking about someone else’s problems at least took my mind of Dixon for a little while. But then the argument stopped, and I was left staring at the door as dawn came, wondering exactly what he was planning to do to me if he found me. If I was definitely going to die no matter what, the best I could hope for was that he’d kill me real quick. That’s not much to look forward to.

Sam and Dean wanted me to wake them at eight o’clock. They were pretty well unconscious and I thought they could probably use a few more hours, but I had promised. I woke Sam with a pretty soft nudge and he headed straight for the shower. Dean was usually somewhat harder to wake, but after a few prods, he was out of bed.

“No trouble?” he asked.

I shook my head, swinging the machete around a little absently, as I headed back to sit by the door.

After the boys had each had a quick shower, to wake them up completely, we agreed it was time to head out and look for Gordon. There were plenty of places down by the river he could hole up, but there were also a lot of places right near us. Dean decided to take the Impala and check further afield, and that Sam and I should start at the motel and work the streets nearby. We could cover a big area in a day, especially if we took different directions.

But before I could even suggest that, Dean had more instructions. “And stick together, you two.”

“So… is he my babysitter now?” I asked, annoyed. There was no reason we couldn’t split up three ways, and cover more ground. I was very worried about Dixon, but that didn’t mean doing a shitty job of this search for Gordon. If he did happen to come out looking for me in the daylight, I would have to take him on my own. But that was okay. Either of the guys would be expected to handle it, so why couldn’t I?

“Or is she mine?” asked Sam, he sounded as irritated as I was.

“For the love of…” Dean muttered. “You both got a vampire psychopath on your trail. Safety in numbers.”

I didn’t know if it was strictly accurate to call Dixon a psychopath. He was more of a creepy, obsessive stalker type. At least you can trust a psychopath to be violent I didn’t know what Dixon was capable of, even before he’d taken a couple of bullets to the face. He was probably pretty angry. That thought scared me more than I was willing to admit. His new obsession with me had been scary enough when he thought I liked him. Now I’d pissed him off.

“I guess you got a point,” I conceded. If we ran into Dixon, Sam would have my back and if we ran into Gordon, I would have his. “Meet us back here before nightfall, yeah? None of us should be out there once it gets dark.”

At least in the daylight, Gordon and Dixon would be slowed down. At night, they’d be superhuman, stronger and faster than we were. If we were all together, in the relative safety of the motel room, we could protect ourselves easier. Dean agreed with this, and promised to be back before dark. Sam and I left before he did, heading out to start our search with the other motels in the area.

It was a crappy part of town, but for that reason, it seemed like a good spot for Gordon to be hiding. There were other motels almost as shady as ours. There were abandoned apartment buildings that we had to go through floor by floor. There were little warehouses, much smaller than the ones by the docks, and thankfully easier to search.

* * *

We spent nearly four hours, just walking street after street, checking out anywhere that Gordon, or his friend Kubrick, might be. We didn’t hear from Dean once, and barely spoke to each other either, unless it was about the job. I didn’t know where Sam’s head was, but I was lost in my own thoughts. Not enough to be distracted, but as I scanned for danger and took in the buildings, I had something on my mind.

Dixon wasn’t dead. Only decapitation can kill a vampire. Complete decapitation. He was just full of bullets and with his head partially hacked off. That’d piss a guy off… But he wasn’t likely to stay in that same warehouse any longer. So, what if we killed Gordon and got that whole thing sorted out? What if Dixon left Albany, ran off somewhere else, still with revenge on his mind and my scent in his nose? I couldn’t stay awake all night every night, waiting in case he showed up.

How close did you have to get before a vampire found you? Would he come bursting into our motel room one night, looking for me? He knew my first name and what I looked like. Could he find out my last name, and wouldn’t that maybe lead him to my dad? Everyone in the hunting world knew us, and not all of them liked us.

As we came out of another empty apartment block, I needed to get my mind off it. But I chose the worst possible method. Looking up at Sam, I saw he was still silently frowning at our surroundings. Usually, when we worked together on something like this, we’d talk. Sometimes serious and sometimes not, but we generally had something to say to each other as we cased buildings for whatever we were hunting. Not that day. Maybe he wasn’t saying anything because I wasn’t, but maybe he was preoccupied too. I figured he was worried about Gordon.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sam,” I said. “Worst case scenario, it’s the three of us against Gordon and Kubrick. Even if they’re both vampires, we can handle that. We’ve taken on nests of a dozen.”

I gave him my best optimistic smile and it wasn’t hard, since I’d all but convinced myself. Two vampires? We could totally handle that. And the chances Kubrick would be fanged up too were pretty slim. It’s not like he’d agree to it.

Sam sighed. “That’s not what… Never mind.”

“Well now I’m worried,” I told him. “What’s bothering you if it’s not Gordon?”

“It doesn’t matter. We better check in there, come on.”

He started walking across the street towards a little house that looked abandoned. The windows were boarded up, and Sam was headed there before I could even answer him. I hurried as quick as I could, catching up to him just as he stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side. Sam always told me when something was upsetting him. He knew he could trust me. He’d told me about the demon blood inside him, even. What could be worse than that?

“Sam, of course it matters. If something’s worrying you…”

“You!” he said, turning around as I reached for his arm. “And Dean. You’re both… It’s like you don’t even care. Either of you.”

“Care about what?” I couldn’t even guess at what he meant.

“Yourselves. Dean is trying to play hero every chance he gets. Forget six months, he’s not gonna make it to next week if he doesn’t stop throwing himself at fangs and bullets. And you, Ellie… You just… What the hell happened last night?”

I knew it was dumb of me to get that close to Dixon the night before, and I’d been thinking about that a lot. But I didn’t know how to say that to Sam. He was comparing my behaviour to Dean’s and that wasn’t fair. I’d fucked up. But Dean had a death wish and that was a totally different thing.

“What do you mean what happened? I just thought maybe he’d tell me something if I played nice…”

“That was playing nice? Insulting him when he was barely half a foot away?”

_Oh, screw you, Sam Winchester_ , I thought. “Oh come on! I lost my temper! That’s nothing like what Dean…”

“He could have killed you, Ellie!”

“Okay! Next time a vampire starts talking about starting a creepy family with you, we’ll wait and see if you can stay calm!”

“Ellie…”

“No!” I scolded him.

How dare he criticise me for that! It wasn’t my fault Dixon had gotten my scent in the first place. This whole case had gone totally to shit because of Gordon, not me. And I’d bet anything Sam had never been threatened the way Dixon was threatening me. Maybe while the obsessive vampire had been talking about what a great family man he was, Sam had missed the implications of the whole thing.

Well I hadn’t. “No, Sam! Don’t you dare tell me to calm down! I tried seductive and I tried nice, and maybe you can tolerate creeps who want to change your species and then freaking mate with you! But turns out I can’t. I’m just a bitch who gets cranky about that kind of thing!”

I turned my back on him and started to head to the little house in front of us. I wasn’t used to Sam being harsh like that. I’d thought he’d get why I lost it back at the warehouse. I thought Sam got  _me._

“Ellie! Wait…” I heard him take two, maybe three steps after me, before his cellphone started to ring.

Figuring it was Dean, I reluctantly leant against the collapsing fence for a moment. He had to answer it. That was more important than any argument we were having.

“Dean? You find him?”

I could tell just from Sam’s face that whoever answered was not his brother. His jaw clicked, his eyes hardened and as I came over, he put his phone on speaker and held it out so I could hear.

_“A factory on Riverside. Off the turnpike. Be here in twenty minutes, or your brother dies.”_

It was Gordon.

* * *

It was not hard to find a car in the neighbourhood that we could steal with ease. This was not an area where people had fancy security systems. I always hated taking cars from people who were unlikely to have insurance, but sometimes there wasn’t a lot of choice. Even though it was obviously a trap, we still had to meet Gordon and rescue Dean.

Funny really, how Dean had insisted on Sam and I sticking together for protection, and now he was the damsel in distress. As we drove there, both of us pretended like we hadn’t been fighting, instead going over possible ways in which Gordon might try to ambush us. We stopped by the motel first, quick as we could, figuring a single machete each might not be quite enough. We got an extra weapon for Dean, too, so he could help us fight our way out if he had to. Then there was the Colt, and I also brought the lockpicks and a pair of wire cutters, since I figured Dean would be restrained somehow.

We found the Impala parked on Riverside, and it was across the road from a factory. This had to be the right place. Two machetes and a gun each, with a third machete for Dean, and we were ready to head in.

With windows boarded up and part of the guttering falling down, the factory clearly wasn’t in use. A chain hung loosely from the door, and at first I thought it had been snipped with bolt cutters. Then I looked at the two loose ends more closely, and the way the metal was bent and twisted.

“Someone ripped this apart,” I said, showing it to Sam.

He took one end and looked at it, then down at me. “We gotta find Dean…”

“Yeah.”

I led the way into the factory, with Sam sticking close behind me. It was the best way, given our height difference. He had the Colt at the ready, while I felt more comfortable with a machete in each hand. We passed through a sort of office space area, where there were lockers and that machine people use to punch their timecards. Kinda old fashioned, but I guess if a system works…

Moving through there and into some kind of open storage area, we crept along quietly. I was listening for voices or footsteps or anything that might tell me where Dean and Gordon were. There were a lot of metal shelves, all stacked high with pieces of… something. I didn’t even know what kind of factory it was. Or why it had been boarded up. But it hardly mattered.

Finally, moving into a new section, I spotted something. It looked like feet, at the other end of the room. I peered around, and I was right. Dean was sitting on the ground, handcuffed to a water pipe. The look on his face would have been almost funny under different circumstances. He wasn’t so much angry as… over it. He was glaring out at the wall opposite him, like he was daring it to make this whole case go worse. He was gagged, too, which must have really pissed him off.

He saw us coming, and rolled his eyes as I got down onto the floor. Sam crouched beside me, taking off the gag while I looked at the handcuffs.

“Are you two stupid?” he asked.

“You’re welcome,” I said, getting the wire cutters from my back pocket.

“This is obviously a trap,” Dean said, but he still leaned forward to get the chain on the handcuffs taut as possible so I could cut through them easily.

“We know that, Dean, we just didn’t care,” Sam said. “Now come on…”

Gordon was likely to spring from anywhere at any moment, so Sam handed Dean the Colt, and grabbed a machete instead. I still had both mine. They probably wouldn’t do me much good if Gordon did actually leap on me, but there’s something about wielding a pair of machetes that makes you feel more confident and powerful.

With me in the middle and Sam at the back again, we headed back the way we had come, all three of us looking around for Gordon. Then, as we passed between one room and another, a roller door I didn’t even know was there slammed down, between me and Sam. It trapped him on the other side, leaving Dean and I powerless to help him.

“Sam!” Dean called, kicking at the roller door. It just clattered as his foot collided, but it did not open, of course.

I could hear Sam pounding on the other side, calling out. After a few heavy clangs, he obviously gave up.

“Sam, be careful!” Dean called.

Meanwhile, I was getting down low, to look at the lock on the door. I pulled at the handle, trying to tug the door upwards, but it was locked, of course. If only Sam hadn’t given Dean the Colt. Now we had a weapon Gordon didn’t know could kill him, but we weren’t able to use it on him.

I peered at the lock, while Dean paced along the wall, obviously looking for another door or some way to get to Sam and Gordon. It was a high tech sort of lock and I didn’t think I’d be able to pick it. There wasn’t anywhere to put the lock pick. It wasn’t opened with a key, but maybe it was remote operated?

“Anything?” I called to Dean, as he came back to stand above me.

“Nothing. You?”

“I think we got more chance of breaking this down than unpicking the lock.”

“I thought you could pick any lock?” he said, sounding agitated.

“There’s gotta be a keyhole, Dean. But these doors are aluminum, right? We run at it together, we can maybe buckle it.”

“Might take a few goes,” he said, going up to the door to holler through. “Hold on Sam!!!”

We backed up a few metres and then both of us ran full speed into the door, aiming to hit right beside each other and at about the same time. There was a horrendous clattering of the metal, but when we looked, we couldn’t see that we’d done any damage at all. Figuring we’d just have to back up again, I started to move but Dean held out a hand to stop me.

“Hold this,” he said, handing me the Colt.

He started much nearer the door this time, and I could see why he was working alone, he just slammed his shoulder into it, over and over again. If we’d tried together, we’d never have been able to synchronise it. Looking down at the Colt, I realised there was still another option. I had my gun in my waistband. Could we shoot the lock?

I grabbed the gun and waved it at him. “Dean!”

But as he came over to take it from me, there was a crash and debris flying everywhere, as two bodies came smashing right through the wall. It was Gordon and Sam. Dean was standing way closer than me, and he had to duck and throw himself down as bits of concrete rained down onto him. They were only small, but if he was hit in the head, he was sure to be hurt.

Sam was clearly struggling to move as he picked his machete back up. But he dropped it again as Gordon grabbed him. He threw him across the room, as though he didn’t weigh anything. Sam was nearly six and a half foot tall, and muscular as hell. Just how strong  _was_ Gordon?

While he was distracted going to pick Sam back up, I looked at the Colt in my hands. I’d never used it before, but a gun’s a gun. I wasn’t sure how it worked though. It was supposed to kill anything, but did it have to be a killing shot? If I just hit him in the leg would that still be enough? Just to be on the safe side, I aimed for his head.

But before I could fire, he had seen me. He grabbed my arm and yanked me closer to him. It was like having my arm caught in a vice, painful and completely impossible for me to fight. Gordon was a big guy, and his hand easily wrapped all the way around my forearm. I thought that was bad enough, but then he was picking me up.

Last time something had picked me up and thrown me across a room, I’d scored that nasty head wound that put me in hospital and made my Dad ban me from hunting. I tried to think how to best protect my head, but he didn’t throw me. Instead, he spun me around and slammed me against the wall.

He pinned me hard to the wall, one of his hands on my arm, the other on my opposite shoulder and his whole body pressed against me, like another wall. The shock of bashing my whole spine against the concrete paralysed me for a moment, and then there was sharp, stabbing pain in my neck. I didn’t know anything except the aching of my whole body, and the agony in my neck.

Then it was gone, I was dropped to the ground. A little dazed, I looked up to see Sam and Gordon were fighting. Dean was still working his way out from under the pile of rubble, but he was almost to his feet. He was groaning with pain, though and it was clear every movement was an effort.

But Gordon had thrown Sam down into the wrong place, because he got up, a piece of razor wire wrapped around each hand, with just a little cloth to protect him. Then, as Gordon grabbed him again, Sam quickly threw the wire around his neck. And he pulled it tight.

The wire cutting into his neck, Gordon puffed and grunted, trying to break free. He stopped gripping Sam so hard, but it was no use. I could see Sam’s face getting redder, his chest rising and falling dramatically as he struggled to pull the wire tight. The cloth over his hands apparently wasn’t helping, as the more blood dripped from Gordon’s neck, the more came from Sam’s hands. Dean was struggling to his feet, trying to help and I realised I ought to do the same. My neck still hurt, but not enough to let Sam fight alone.

But before I could get my balance, the wire ripped through Gordon’s neck entirely, severing his head. It hit the ground just a little before the body thumped down alongside it. He was definitely dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have gone off book again, and I love it! For those who don’t remember, originally, Gordon takes a woman hostage and demands Sam and Dean come, then splits Sam off and he’s turned the woman into a vampire so that distracts Dean.
> 
> Originally, my thought was to have Gordon take Ellie hostage so I could have Ellie talk to him and interact with him more. But then I thought “Nah! I’m not adding a badass female character to the story just to have her be held hostage. But… you know what’d be fun?” Hence Damsel in Distress Dean. But I did make Ellie the victim of Gordon’s bite in the end, rather than Dean, to even out the pummeling a bit. Both boys walk away pretty sore at the end of the episode, so I needed to hurt Ellie some too.
> 
> Anyway… just in case you enjoy reading about my thought process, there it is. Next chapter will be tying up a few loose ends, but you guys… A Very Supernatural Christmas is coming…


	50. Chapter 49: Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With everything that happened with the two vampires, Ellie is not feeling so good. But… what will Bobby say about all this?

Once Gordon’s head and body were lying separately on the floor, I no longer had the incentive to stand up. Sam and Dean didn’t need me. They were fine, Gordon was dead and oh… I was kinda woozy… I collapsed back down against the wall, putting a hand to my still throbbing neck. It was definitely wet and slippery. When I looked at my fingers, I saw they were covered in blood. No wonder I’d found it hard to get up.

Dean had staggered out of the hunks of concrete that had fallen on him. His hair, his face and his clothes were all sprinkled with a light coating of grey dust. All I could think was that I hoped there wasn’t asbestos in that wall. That was all that was going through my head until Sam was at my side, putting his bloodied hand to my bloodied neck. Then I laughed.

“Can’t even keep the blood in your own body, Sam!”

“I’m fine,” he said, moving my hair out of the way and tilting my head so he could get to my neck properly.

I was dimly aware of Dean stumbling over, though I couldn’t really see his face. He was sort of blurry. “You just charged a super vamped out Gordon with no weapon. That’s a little reckless, don’t you think?”

I laughed again, and Sam even smiled slightly. “Hold here,” he told Dean. I could now see his face a little better, as he shifted around to where Sam had been and held his own fingers to my neck while Sam disappeared from my limited view.

“Is he leaving?” I asked Dean. “Why’s he leaving me?”

While his one hand was pressing hard against my neck, his other was stroking my hair back from my temple. His calloused hand felt nice and warm, brushing against my skin. “It’s okay, sweetheart. He just went to get something for your neck. Sam wouldn’t leave you.”

“We had a fight,” I mumbled. It seemed like days ago, but it was probably only an hour. I’d been so mad, but I was having trouble remembering why. “I yelled at him.”

Still keeping those fingers tight on my wound, Dean moved a little, his face coming down closer to me as he pressed a kiss on top of my head, being careful not to move me. “That’s okay. He’s a big boy, he can handle it.”

“I’m so mean…” I mumbled. How could I yell at Sam when he was being hunted by a vampire psychopath? Sure, he’d said… something… but whatever it was, he had an excuse to be a little cranky.

Dean just chuckled. “You’re a freakin’ marshmallow, kid.”

I didn’t really understand what he meant by that, and I was too sleepy to ask. I just sat still for a while, letting him hold me and brush back my hair and get my blood all over him, which was real nice of him. I had no conception of time, just pain, but it seemed like ages before Sam came back. Dean moved out of his way, and he balled up something in his hand so he could squish it against my neck.

“Looks like he ripped her throat open a little,” said Dean. “Hospital?”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed.

“No!” I let out a faint little squeak of protest. “No, not hospital!” If they took me to a hospital, my Dad would have to be contacted, because of the insurance. Then he’d call the boys and they’d have to tell him everything, and he’d worry, and he didn’t need that. He was already concerned enough about me being away and hunting all the time. Why upset him by telling him Gordon had turned into a vampire and tried to rip out my jugular vein?

“You’re losing a lot of…”

“No!”

“Okay,” Sam cooed, speaking to me very softly, while he wrapped another piece of cloth around my neck. “Okay.” I felt his arm go under my knees and another slipped behind my back as he lifted me up.

I tried to get my feet down onto the ground, as I figured he was trying to help me stand. I was pretty sure I’d be able to stand up, if I just had a little help. But Sam’s hands were gripping onto me firmly and he wouldn’t let me try.

“No hospitals, but don’t move, okay? Just keep your head back and don’t try to do anything.”

“Like this?” I asked, resting my head against his chest. I could hear his heart beating, still quite fast, and even through his shirt, I could feel that he was very warm.

“Yeah,” he said. “Dean… the Colt…”

I might have drifted out of consciousness for a minute or so, because the next thing I knew, I was outside. I was still pressed up against Sam’s torso, and it felt very peaceful. Very safe. I’d be okay there, I was sure. But what about when he put me down? Dean said something about my throat being ripped, didn’t he?

“Sam? Am I gonna die?”

“No.”

He wasn’t normally a liar, but he might not be honest, if he was trying to keep me from being scared. “Please don’t lie…”

“I’m not lying. You’ll be okay. I promise.”

“I’m sorry I yelled at you…”

“You were right. Okay… I’m gonna put you in the car now, so this might hurt a little. You okay?”

I nodded, although I didn’t really want him to put me down. Somehow, I felt like I definitely couldn’t die if he was holding onto me, but once he put me in the car and jumped into the front seat, I’d be all by myself, and who knew what could happen to me? Maybe we’d hit a bump and whatever was wrong with my neck would get worse and all my blood would come out and maybe they  _should_  take me to the hospital…

But he didn’t leave me. Once I was in, he got in beside me, holding me upright with one arm and letting me rest my head against his other. I think I fell asleep.

* * *

My dreams were really weird, and scary, but I couldn’t remember them after. Just the feeling of fear and running and running because something chased me. Then there was a lot of pain, in my chest and my neck and I thought I might be awake.

When I opened my eyes, I saw I was back in the motel, but not on the gross mouldy mattress I’d been sleeping on. I was in Dean’s bed, all tucked in neat and safe. The curtains were closed, and the room was dark, but I could see the sunlight coming through from outside.

It was starting to come back to me. Gordon had bit me, and the pain of fangs digging right into my neck came right back. I put my hand up and felt the painful spot. Some kind of dressing had been put there, so all I could feel was that smooth waterproof bandaid stuff.

Where were Sam and Dean? When I opened my mouth to call them, nothing came out, so, with a lot of effort, I forced myself to sit up. I got one foot out from under the covers, and then the other. They both slipped down onto the ground and then suddenly, everything went blurry and black.

* * *

I woke up again. This time, I could tell I wasn’t alone. There was a hand on my hair, right by my temple. It wasn’t moving much. Every now and again, whoever it was moved their thumb just a little. It was nice, soothing. My eyes were open, or so I thought, but I couldn’t really see. Everything was all blurry and weird black dots were floating in front of my eyes.

Turning my head to try and see who was sitting next to me, I got a vague sense of shape and colour. Slowly, the dots started to fade away and things got more in focus, a little at a time. It was Sam, sitting on a chair beside the bed, and holding a book with one hand while he kept the other in my hair.

“Sam?” my voice sounded really faint and weak, which was just the way I felt.

He put his book down immediately, and turned in his chair so he was facing me. His hand moved, pushing some of the hair back from my face. “Hey, Sweetpea.”

I stared at him for a second, in absolute shock. He used to call me that all the time. For two or three years, that had been my nickname. My dad took us camping, and we’d gone exploring and found this big field full of flowers. Little bully that I was, I’d made Sam help me decorate my hair with them. Dad had laughed when we came back, because they were mostly weeds, but I thought they were pretty anyway. My favourite had been this cute little bright purple one. There mustn’t have been any pink ones. Dad said it was called a Sweetpea, so Sam had started calling me that. Until a few years later, when Dean heard him and started laughing his ass off.

Sam’s favourite flower was a yellow one, and Dad didn’t know what it was called. I took some back home, pressed in between pages of a book. Mrs Dalton, who took care of me sometimes, said it was a Sun Drop. I liked the sound of that, so I called him it.

I had forgotten all about the flowers. Now I smiled as I looked up at Sam, and he frowned, moving his hand out of my hair, and shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Oh God, Ellie, I’m sorry. I haven’t called you that in years, I don’t know why I just… I was thinking about the field before and it slipped out…”

“S’okay Sun Drop,” I muttered. I knew that Sweetpea was often a somewhat intimate term of endearment. But I knew Sam didn’t mean it romantically. He hadn’t seen me that way when he was nine and he didn’t now either.

“Sun Drop…” Sam smiled. “How do you feel?”

I felt like I’d been hit repeatedly with a brick. “Fuzzy… Why you sit there?”

“Didn’t want you to wake up and try walking again. You passed out.”

“Why’m I so dizzy?”

The hand he had quickly removed before went up to my forehead, as he checked my temperature. He did the same on my cheek, feeling my skin with the back of his fingers.  “You lost so much blood,” he told me, as his hand shifted back up and into my hair. “So you need to take it easy for a while, okay? Til your body makes some more.”

“You killed Gordon…” I had a vague memory of it, Sam pulling razor wire as hard as he could, taking off Gordon’s head. He’d cut into his palms. “Your hands…”

The fingers of his right hand were still curled in the hair on my temple. But he held his left palm up to show me. There were a lot of scratches and scrapes and it looked very sore, but he was obviously okay to use it, and the blood was gone.

“It hurt?”

He nodded. “Little. What about your neck?”

“Stings. ‘N my chest hurts.”

“Yeah… Remember those ribs you didn’t crack in Massachusetts? Might be one cracked now.”

It must have happened when Gordon had slammed me against that wall, crushing me between the weight of the concrete and his own body. Something about that thought process brought another memory back to my mind and I was suddenly filled with adrenalin. I tried to leap up out of the bed, overcome with a sense of urgency. Gordon was dead but Dixon was still out there.

But Sam was ready for me, and he was immediately upright, grabbing me by both shoulders and guiding me down, forcing me to stay. “Ellie… Shh… What’s the matter?”

“Dixon!” I squeaked, still trying to get up. “He…”

“It’s okay,” Sam said, his voice low and soothing as he kept holding me down. “We didn’t forget. Dean’s looking for him.”

Knowing Dean was out looking helped calm me down, and I stopped trying to fight my way out of bed. They’d talked about it while I was out, and decided Dixon was a serious threat and worth worrying about. They cared about him threatening me.

Seeing I was calm and quiet, Sam took his hands off my shoulders. Rather than taking the chair again, he sat beside me on the bed, turning his whole torso so he could see my face. He smiled slightly, then leant forward to brush the hair back from my face again. My damn hair! Maybe I should have cut it even shorter.

“M’sorry,” I said, wondering if he’d rub his thumb gently along my temple like that if I had a little pixie cut. Probably not. “M’sorry I yelled at you.”

Now he frowned. “No. No… you were right.  _I’m_  sorry. I thought you were reckless… I didn’t… You were so brave, I didn’t notice how scared you were. Of course you’re scared. I’m sorry.”

“S’just… I’m used to monsters wanting to kill me, ya know? Not… Not…” Trying to make me like them, and obsessing about me and believing I was their soulmate and touching my face, and… creepy shit like that.

“I know,” said Sam. “I’m sorry.”

“What if Dean can’t find him?” I asked.

I’d never known anybody who had a vampire tracking them before. Everyone knew you had to kill them right off, otherwise they’d get your scent, and you’d have to be on the lookout, all the time, every day, in case they came for you. What if he got himself together a nest?

“Then we’ll take precautions,” Sam said. “We’ll look into protection. Garlic and crosses aren’t a thing, but… We’ll find something else. I promise.”

I really believed him. If it was possible to protect me from Dixon, Sam would figure out how. Then I remembered something awful and gave an involuntary squeak of fear. “My dad… We gotta tell my dad.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve been thinking about that. Do you want me to tell him? I mean… we were supposed to have your back, and we didn’t, so…”

I shook my head. None of this was my fault, but it wasn’t Sam or Dean’s either. They had been where they were supposed to be. It was Gordon that caused the problem, not them. “Not your fault.” Although… I really wouldn’t mind having someone else break this news to my father. Give him time to calm down before he started yelling at me that this was bound to happen and he was right and I should come home and all the rest of it. “What would you say?”

“The truth. I’ll tell him what happened and how amazing you were, and how Gordon turned up. Then I’ll just explain he might come after you, but we’ve got your back. For real, this time.”

I tried to smile. I felt like that was what my face was doing, but it was hard to say when I was so out of it.

“I’ll promise Bobby that we’ll try to take as much care of you as you do of us.”

That was sweet, given that they were both huge beefy guys feared by monsters across America, while I was more a sort of competent, but comparatively weak sidekick. In terms of watching out for one another, I was definitely getting the better deal.

“But, maybe Dean will find him, anyway,” I said, trying out this idea as I said it. “How far could he have got the way he was?”

Those dimples burst onto his face, framing his smile like deep little craters. If I’d been drunk and able to move, God knows what would have happened, but weak and fuzzy like I was, I just stared at his smile, letting it fill me up inside. Sure, I had one vampire stalking me, and another had just tried to rip my whole throat out. And my father was going to have proof I was too weak and girly to hunt. But hey, Sam’s smile existed, so the world couldn’t be that bad after all. No wonder little me used to call him Sun Drop. He was made of actual sunshine.

“Maybe,” he said. “You know you’re starting to slur? You’re really tired, aren’t you?”

I nodded. Every word I said was a struggle to force out of my mouth. At least he was onto me now, and I could stop pretending like I was okay to talk.

“How about you get some more sleep? I’ll be here if you need me.”

“K. Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Can call me Sweetpea if you wanna. I know you don’t mean it… you know, like that.”

In that moment, staring up at his dimpled smile, I actually wouldn’t have minded if he did. Not that I was specifically wanting it or anything… Obviously… It was just an idea worth entertaining, casually. It would never happen, but there were definitely things in the world that would be worse than Sam calling me Sweetpea and meaning it the way people usually meant it.

“Maybe I’ll just call you Pea,” he said. “Cos you’re so small.”

“M’good height. You’re a giant.”

He laughed, and bent down closer to me, which for him was a long way. He planted a little kiss on my temple, very sweet, very brother-like. Then he got up. “Get some sleep, you miniscule sweetpea.”

“Big giant sun drop,” I muttered, my eyes already starting to close. I could hear him laughing at me as he left the room.

* * *

Dean did not find Dixon. The next time I woke, several hours later, he was back, breaking the news that he’d seen no sign of the vampire. The two bodies in the warehouse had made the news, minus the information that the victims’ heads had been torn off. That was probably a bit much for most civilians to hear.

He had brought me back a bucket of chicken as consolation, and very generously helped me eat it. The next day, he checked us out of the dingy, mouldy-ridden motel and dropped Sam and I off somewhere a little more comfortable. Not a classy place, like in Atlantic City, but a nice motor inn, where we could open the curtains, and the beds were less like boards. He drove off to go looking again, while Sam settled me in a new bed, since I was too exhausted from the move to even move my legs properly.

According to Dean, I probably ought to have had a transfusion, but since I’d been so insistent on not being taken to a hospital, they had done the best they could. They’d nearly cracked and taken me to the ER when I passed out in the car, though. They demanded I take a few days to rest, stay in bed, do as I was told and let myself heal. There was that potential cracked rib to worry about too. When I complained, Sam reminded me that I always told them I was in charge of their wound treatment and recovery and they had to obey me for their own good. He had a point, so I shut up and let him do everything for me. Meanwhile, Dean would spend his days scouting the warehouses and factories of Albany, looking for Dixon.

He never found him, and finally, Sam and I agreed the time had come to call my father. I chickened out, unable to bear speaking to Dad and being told this whole thing was predictable and inevitable and I needed to go home.

Sam took his cell outside to make the call for me. I sat in bed for ten minutes, worriedly picking at the dirt under my fingernails and wondering if my father would drive to Albany right away and drag me back, kicking and screaming, cracked rib or not. Finally, Sam came back in, his face very pale. He sat down heavily, letting out a huge sigh, and frowning deeply.

“Are you okay? What did he say to you?”

“Nothing I don’t deserve,” Sam said, which could not possibly have been true. “He’ll call tomorrow, when he’s had time to calm down.”

“Did he yell at you!? Sam, if he blames this on you I swear… OW!”

I had risen half up out of bed in my indignation, and had to fall back down onto the pillows again, clutching at my chest. At least the need to get me lying down flat again and help me take some painkillers distracted Sam.

Dean was with us the next day, having finally agreed to my request that he stop looking for Dixon. It was futile. He had probably left Albany to lick his wounds for a while, and it was possible we’d never even see him again. Wounded as he was, he’d be an easy kill for some other Hunter.

I made the boys sit on the bed with me and play cards. Then I bullied them both into getting into the bed on either side of me to watch some movies. Dean wondered what the point was if Sam and I were just going to talk all the way through, but it only took a few pouty faces and reminding about my terrible wounds to get my own way. We did talk all the way through, though.

Finally, Dad called. I took three deep breaths before I answered it and then turned on my maximum level of good cheer.

“Hi Daddy!”

“Don’t  _Hi Daddy_  me, girl. What the hell were you thinking?”

“It was a solid plan, Dad. Everything would have gone fine if Gordon hadn’t…”

“Yeah, well it didn’t go fine, did it!? This is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid…”

“I thought you were afraid of me getting my head split open again, not vampire stalkers!” I said, cutting him off the way he’d done to me.

“Yeah. Well this is worse than anything I imagined. And a father can imagine a lot, Ellie.”

I pulled a face at the phone. Dean was still sitting beside me but Sam had taken the opportunity to go to the bathroom. With my right hand holding the phone, my left was sitting limp on top of the blankets and I felt Dean’s hand slip on top. He just left it sitting there, a silent show of solidarity while my father yelled at me.

“I thought you were gonna calm down before you called…”

“This  _is_ calm! I knew it. I knew I couldn’t trust those two…”

“Dad, did you yell at Sam?” I asked, and I hoped my voice sounded even half as furious as I was.

“I told him that…”

“Don’t you  _ever_ do that again!” I warned him. “Sam and Dean have done nothing but look out for me and if you dare be anything but grateful, I’ll…” I didn’t actually know what I’d do. Punch my father in the face? Maybe… I couldn’t rule it out. “Just  _don’t_!”

“Ellie, you listen to me…”

“No,  _you listen to me_! I am an adult, Dad! I am a grown up! You don’t get to decide how I live and you don’t get to call me and yell at me just because things don’t go right! There’s a vampire stalking me, Daddy! Another tried to rip my throat open! But I’m fine,  _thanks for freakin’ asking!_ ”

There was a series of spluttering sounds on the other end of the line and then “Ellie, if you think I am  _ever_  gonna stop caring about my daughter, you can…”

“Caring would be saying  _sorry this happened, it sounds scary, are you alright, how can I help?_ ” I reminded him, already starting to cry, even as I was shouting. It was true. He hadn’t even asked if I was okay. If he was really worried about me, shouldn’t that have been the first thing he said? “So I don’t know what this is, but don’t you try to paint it like concern!”

Sam had come back into the room, and he rushed over to the bed, sitting back down on my other side and quickly getting an arm across my shoulders.

My Dad’s voice had gone from angry to something I couldn’t even define. It was sort of flat and dead. “Alright. I’m sorry, kiddo. I should have asked how you’re doing. I…”

But I was way too mad. I had gone past the point where I was interested in apologies. “Save it! It’s obvious you don’t think I can do this, so why do you even bother to call and check in!? What are you just waiting for me to fail big enough so I  _have_  to come home?”

“Ellie…”

“If you start caring how I am, you better call Dean! I’m not gonna answer!” I yelled, before pressing the hang up button and throwing the phone down onto the blankets. It bounced, and fell off the end of the bed, but I didn’t care.

I was too busy sobbing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A milion bajillion thankyous to my friend Em, who rose to my emergency challenge to help find a good nickname for Sam to call Ellie. SHE HIT ME RIGHT IN MY FREAKIN’ FEELS, YOU GUYS!
> 
> You should definitely google Sweet Peas (they're bright bright purple) and Sun Drops (equally bright yellow, they are a kind of primrose). The story about camping and that field is a Special Chapter I posted to Tumblr: http://winchestersplusone.tumblr.com/post/120092790938/special-chapter-sunny
> 
> We did an extensive survey of flowers that might have been in that field. Not gonna lie, there was a brief period where Ellie’s childhood nickname was nearly “American Hogpeanut”. Cos it was just so wrong it was almost right!


	51. Chapter 50: White Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s very cold, and there’s a lot of snow. Ellie is counting down to Christmas time!

_November 23rd_

“Okay, I got candy for us, trail mix for Sam and they have coke in a six-pack,” I said, bounding over to Dean with my basket. “Plus, look! Pretzels!” I held up the packet to show him. Pretzels and candy. Perfect road food.

“Nice work,” Dean said. “I got shaving cream, and here’s that fruity shampoo you like.”

“Yeah! That is the right one!” I had not expected Dean to recognise my shampoo when he saw it. I tended to buy the same one when I could get it, although I didn’t much care about the scent. It came in mango, berries, apple; a bunch of different fragrances and they were all amazing. The main thing was it made my hair look shiny and maybe even flatten down a little.

“And check it out,” he said, holding up a packet to show me. “They’re selling candy canes already! Not even December yet!”

“Oh, great!”

“Cos you love peppermint, right?”

I did love peppermint. But not in that shape. Never in that shape. But how to explain that to Dean.

“Right…”

* * *

_November 25th_

Even with the heat blasting and multiple layers on, it was still freezing in the Impala. The legos jammed in the radiator were rattling so loud it seemed like the car was coming apart.

“It’s so freakin’ freezing,” I muttered, mostly to myself.

“You want to pull over?” Sam asked. “I could get your blanket out of the trunk…”

I didn’t want to piss Dean off by asking him to stop. Or make Sam get out into the snow and rummage around in the trunk just for me.

“No, it’s okay.”

“You sure?” Dean asked. “Be a couple hours still. You gonna be okay back there?”

I hadn’t expected Dean to be worried about me getting cold, but I appreciated it. Still, I didn’t want him going out and getting cold any more than Sam, just because I couldn’t handle a little chill.

“Not worth it,” I said, trying to stop my teeth chattering so they wouldn’t know I was lying. “I’m just whining, ignore me.”

This was good enough for Dean, but Sam started wriggling in his seat and I realised he was taking his jacket off.

“Sam, don’t…”

“Seriously, Pea, if we turn the heat up anymore, I’m gonna boil. Wear it.”

He handed it back to me without looking and I took it. It was so big that it made a better blanket for me than a jacket, so I draped it round myself. It smelt nice, vaguely like Sam’s aftershave. It was like being hugged by him, and that’s a warm experience, so maybe thinking of it helped. It wasn’t surprising Sam was warm. He seemed to give off heat.

“At least it’ll be a white Christmas, huh Ellie!?” said Dean, still keeping his attention on the road.

I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I’m sure he didn’t buy it. “Oh, yeah! That’ll be fun!”

* * *

_November 27th_

“Ellie!” Sam called, through the bathroom door. “Bobby’s on the phone, he says…”

“Tell him to F off!” I called, tweezers poised and ready over my eyebrow.

I heard Sam sigh on the other side, but he didn’t try to persuade me or anything. He knew better than that.

* * *

_November 29th_

The only other person in the laundromat was the middle aged Russian man behind the counter. The only time he’d looked up was when we came in, and even then he’d taken one look and gone back to his magazine. He didn’t even look up when I had to kick the washers to get them to start.

We sat along the wall, playing games in a crappy notebook, and trying to filter out the crackly music from the Russian guy’s radio. It was a weird station. Sinatra, followed by Madonna, then some Bon Jovi. They all sounded sorta the same, just wobbly voices, punctuated with static.

After forty five minutes, first sorting, then washing and then drying, all our clothes were finally ready. We had to use two dryers at a time to fit them all, and they dinged at us, one at a time. Sam emptied one and I the other, sweeping the entire contents into the big baskets the laundromat supplied.

“Some of this is still damp,” I sighed. “It’ll have to go through again.”

Most of it was jeans, although a jacket of Sam’s needed to go back in too. We chucked them into one of the smaller dryers, and carried the rest back to fold them at the big table. Might as well, since we were stuck there.

We sorted them by who they belonged to, as we went. I was a quick folder, but Sam went a little slower.

“Uh… er…”

I looked up and laughed. He had successfully folded up some of my underwear without any comment, but this particular item was giving him some trouble.

“What?” I asked.

“How do I… they’re kinda…” He was blushing as he held it out to me.

I took it from him, with a giggle. He had his flustered smile and dimples. I should definitely make him fold my laundry more often.

“Never seen a g-string before?” I asked, quickly flipping it up into a neat little triangle.

“No, I have… I just… “

“Picturing it, huh?” I teased. “Well, if you need more context, I usually wear it with that pink bra…”

He went from a little pale pink on his cheeks to a much brighter hue and over most of his face. “I wasn’t! I just meant…”

“Don’t have to be embarrassed, Sam.” I held up a pair of plain white briefs that I knew for sure were not Dean’s. “I’ve just discovered why you always wear boxers when you get out of the shower. These don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?”

He stared at me for a second, blush still rising on his face. Then he smiled. “They cover a lot up, actually.”

They didn’t look like it. Sure they were large, but so was their owner. They looked like they would sit pretty low on his hips, so I didn’t see how they could cover that much…

Oh. Now I was the one staring, in absolute shock. I wasn’t used to such remarks out of Sam. Dean and I were playing the deliberately sexy game all the time, but I expected better out of Sam! I didn’t realise he even knew what innuendo was!

“Did you just… Sam!”

I threw his underwear at him, and he caught it, with a smirk, before balling up one of my tank tops and throwing it at me as hard as he could. I just had time to step out of the way as it whooshed past me. It landed on the floor, over by the Russian man and his radio. Going over to fetch it, I could hear a little more clearly through the crackle of static.

“Is that  _The Little Drummer Boy_?” I asked. Of all the annoying Christmas carols, that was my absolute least favourite.

Sam looked up, as I started heading back with a shirt. He pulled a face. “Yep.”

“It’s freakin’ November,” I muttered, and the remainder of my folding was done in agitated silence.

* * *

_December 1st_

“Shh, honey! It’s a library. You can’t yell in here.”

It was just one of those small town libraries, a few bestsellers, some kid’s books and the local records. My new friend Margie the Librarian was out back in the archives, looking for old town maps for me. So, apart from the mother and her little girl, it was just me.

“But Mommy, that lady has freckles like mine, look!”

I glanced up from the newspaper to see that the kid was looking at me and pointing. I hadn’t really noticed how freckly she was. She must have been five or six, and she had dark hair and very pale skin, with freckles on just about every inch of her face. I had loads of freckles at her age too, though most of them had faded a little as I got older. I always used those lightening products on them in my teens, but I didn’t know if they worked.

“I’m so sorry,” said the mother. “Lilly, it’s rude to point.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You got a lot of freckles, huh?”

Lilly pulled her mother’s hand to bring her closer to me. “Yup. I hate them. But Mummy says they’re just what the sun makes.”

“I used to hate mine too,” I said. “But now I think they make my face more interesting. They used to be real dark. Like yours. Especially on my nose.”

“How come they’re not dark no more? Will mine look like yours?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. You’ll have to wait and see.”

“I hope so. You’re pretty.”

She was so adorable. All rugged up warm in her little green overcoat and scarf, she looked almost round. She had her freckled face sticking out the top, and little clips in her hair that had flowers on. Her stockinged legs stuck out the bottom, and she was wearing tiny little cowgirl boots. Also with flowers. Just precious, and I kind of wanted to hug her. That’d be weird, though.

“Thankyou. So are you. Your freckles look lovely. And I like your boots. Do you like reading?”

“Yup! Mummy reads with me every night!”

“Awesome,” I said. “I like reading too. I hope you find some good books.”

Margie returned from the archive room, two large rolled up sheets under her arm. “I found them, at last. Just misfiled. Oh, hello Lilly! Having a day out with your mama, again?”

“We went to the park!” said Lilly.

Margie put the maps down for me and told me to let her know if I needed anything else. Then she headed away to find Lilly and her mother some books they’d like. I listened to Lilly chattering away as I rolled out the first map, trying to hold back my emotions.

 _Just focus on the damn case, Ellie_ , I thought.  _Don’t do this again. Not again._

* * *

_December 3rd_

“I’m not coming out!”

“Now who’s whiny?!” I called through the curtain. “Come on, it’s just a suit!”

“This is your fault,” Dean yelled back, as he ripped open the curtain.

Oh, come on. My fault? It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t get the damn body to catch fire. It was so freakin’ windy. And the sleet didn’t help. So maybe that gave the spirit an extra two minutes to beat on Dean and tear up his Fed-suit, but that was arguably a job hazard.

“Hurry up and get out here, it can’t be that bad!”

It was that bad. As soon as he opened the change room curtain and stepped out, I erupted into giggles. That’s the thing about buying suits second hand. You don’t exactly get the latest fashion.

“Oh my God, you look like a junior reporter from 1985!”

“Shut up!”

“Or a twelve year old in Grandpa’s old church suit!”

“Stop laughing, Ellie!”

I heard the approach of a store clerk. Still doubled over with laughter, I didn’t look at her for a moment, while she was talking to Dean.

“Hmmm… It’s the right size, but we might having something a little more in fashion. Let me go take a look.”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Dean said. “My friend here is supposed to be helping but she’d rather laugh.”

“But… the shoulders!” I squeaked, finally looking up, and that stopped me laughing immediately.

She was wearing an elf hat. With ears. Ugh.

* * *

_December 5th_

When I first started travelling with the boys, the very first time I had a bad day and got irritated, Dean made a remark suggesting it might be my time of the month. I kicked him in the shin. About a week after that, Dean discovered that stereotypes are not always accurate. I am not ever irritable when that time rolls around.

My personality doesn’t change. Instead it amplifies. I become Ellie Plus. Needy, sulky, obsessed with junk food and highly emotionally vulnerable. I can still get on with things, keep hunting, go about my usual business. And you’d probably never know what was going on, unless you knew what signs to look for.

In December, it hit me the morning we left Portland, Oregon. For a drive to Tulsa. A minimum of twenty-four hours driving, so we could check out a ghost sighting. It was definitely a case. Five people, all total strangers, had witnessed a murder in a public park, and all five described the killer the same way. Including that he had vanished into thin air. We had good reason to go to Tulsa. I just didn’t want to.

“Dean! Please pull over at the next gas station!”

“Again?! Come on Ellie, this is getting ridiculous.”

“You want some more candy?” Sam asked, like he was bribing a child. “I got you those pineapple chocolate things.”

I still needed to go to the bathroom again, but I perked up immediately at the thought of the pineapple things. “I still need a bathroom,” I said. “But I’ll take the candy anyway!”

Sam passed the bag back to me with a smile, and after I opened it, I immediately put four into my mouth at once, before holding the open bag out between the two of them.

“oo’ant so’ Dee,” I said, not caring what I’d been told about talking with my mouth full.

Dean took some, but it was small consolation for making him pull over yet again. He did, though, and after I went to the bathroom, I came back to the car to pop some more painkillers with some healthy coke to wash it down.

The boys had both stayed waiting in the car for me. It was a dump of a place, just two pumps and a cigarette counter along a lonely stretch of highway. All the same, they’d done their best, as Dean pointed out.

“Check it out, Ellie. They got one of those wooden Santas on the roof. Wooden Santa is probably the most fun they ever have here, huh?”

I was already in my seat, and just needed to grab my blanket and get comfy. I didn’t mean to slam the door. It just sorta happened.

* * *

_December 7th_

“And when will you be checking out?” asked the receptionist. Her nametag said  _Francine_.

“We don’t know,” Dean said.

“Okay. In that case, we’ll need you to pay the first night in advance and take a credit card.”

“Sure thing.” Dean handed over a credit card made out to Gus Brackenholme. Sometimes he just threw random syllables together until it sounded like a name.

“So, what brings you to Tulsa?” Francine asked, while she ran the card.

“Business,” I said, digging back into my bag of liquorice. “It’s two Queens, right?”

“Right,” she said, with a smile. Probably wondering which one of the guys I was sleeping with. They usually did. Francine was a busty blonde, so I could bet Dean would make out like Sam and I were together. He usually did. “Well, you gotta check out the light show!” she said. “Out west, the whole neighbourhood puts up Christmas lights for the whole of December. Pretty spectacular.”

“Sounds awesome,” I said, leaving Dean to flirt with her while I went outside to stand in the cold with Sam. Screw the weather, I needed fresh air.

As the door swung behind me, I could still hear Dean. “My sister-in-law. She hates long drives. Make her cranky.”

* * *

_December 9th_

“To a job well done!” said Moira, holding up her beer.

We all clanked our bottles against hers. The trouble in Tulsa had turned out to be the demolition of a graveyard disturbing a bunch of spirits. They’d been contained for years, getting madder and less human, and the bulldozers had let them out. It had taken nine hunters, arriving in four separate groups. But we had pulled it off. For us all to work together was a miracle, really.

Four drinks later and I was ready to call it a night. Moira and her husband, Casey were okay. Good people. They knew my father and I’d met them before at Ellen’s. There was Annie. I’d known her for years. I had a strong suspicion she and my father had history, but that wasn’t something I wanted to think about. Then there were the three cousins. All of them were kinda cute, but not in Sam and Dean’s league. Not that it mattered.

“You seem kinda bored,” said one of them, a blue-eyed blonde Viking throwback called Joey.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”

“If you want to head back to the motel, I don’t mind walking you.”

I looked away from my beer and up at him. It was possible that didn’t mean what I thought it meant. Until I felt his hand on my knee under the table.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t go home with other hunters.”

His hand slipped up a little higher, as he leant into me. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

He was on the ground within seconds, with his other hand wrapped around his snapped wrist. I was pretty sure I’d pulled hard enough. I’d definitely heard the crack.

“I said no,” I repeated.

His cousins had got down on the ground on either side of him, before they’d even entirely processed what had happened. Sam and Dean were up and flanking me, and Annie moved towards me too. Moira and Casey seemed more nervous and sat back, watching the unfolding scene.

“You okay?” Dean asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “But I want to head back. Could one of you please come?”

“I’m done anyway,” Dean said, and Sam agreed. They both threw down the last of their beers while Joey’s cousins were helping him up.

“Annie, Casey, Moira… A pleasure,” Sam said. “Call if you ever need anything.”

It can’t have been more than sixty seconds after I’d knocked Joey to the ground before I was moving towards the door, Sam to one side and Dean in front of me.

“You bitch!” Joey called after me. “Didn’t your mama teach you any manners?”

Not even Sam’s strength could hold me back.

* * *

_December 11th_

“It’s cold as balls, Dean! How long is this gonna take?”

“You could help, Princess!”

Ha! I’d tried to help Dean under the hood of the Impala, but he said I didn’t understand his baby like he did. Probably not, but I wasn’t going to just hand him wrenches all afternoon. My father was a mechanic, same as his. In fact, my father probably taught him at least as much about cars as his own did.

“Yeah, I’ll bring you beer and sandwiches.”

If my choices were giving the kind of help Dean wanted or sitting around waiting for him to be done, then I was happier sitting in the car with the doors open. It let the chill in, but at least it wasn’t snowing for once. Sam was a little way off from the road, doing something private, but when he came back he’d help Dean. He was learning how to fix the car, and it hurt to think about why.

“You used to bake me cookies,” Dean said. “What happened to sundress and cookie Ellie?”

I shrugged. Sundress and cookie Ellie still existed. But not for the likes of Dean Winchester. We had definitely become friends, and we got along great most of the time. I trusted him with my life and he knew what shampoo to buy me. But he was not worth baking cookies for.

“Dream on, darlin’! I still make a mean chocolate chip, but you’re getting squat!”

He looked up from the engine for a second, and grinned at me. “Yeah, but if you’re making them for Sam, I’ll get a couple.”

Oh God, not again! Dean had been on a serious “Sammy’s Little Girlfriend” kick the past fortnight and I’d had just about enough of it. My temper was increasingly short.

“Fuck off,” I muttered.

“Well that’s not nice! Where’s your Christmas spirit?”

I got my legs back inside the car and slammed the door.

* * *

_December 13th_

“What the hell kind of spirit haunts a department store?” I moaned.

Breaking into the place hadn’t been easy, and it was cold again. At least black turtlenecks and balaclavas retain heat, right?

“These old rich guys, they don’t want to let the business go when they die,” Dean said. “Okay… Sam, you check menswear. I’ll stay here. Ellie, head to Santa’s Grotto.”

I sighed and considered beating Dean’s head in with my torch.

“Okay,” he went on, gesturing at me to head on over to the Santa display. “Scream if he attacks you.”

* * *

_December 15th_

Even though I’d used the hairdryer to prevent dripping cold water all over me, I was still shivering a little as I came out of the bathroom. The boys had brought in both my blankets, and left them for me on top of my bag. After folding up the dirty clothes and putting them away, I unravelled both blankets. I threw myself down onto the crappy little sofa next to Sam, and covered myself up, starting with my toes. I should have got socks, but that would mean getting up again.

Sam put his hand under the blankets, feeling my foot. His hand was so warm! “You’re freezing, Pea.”

“The bathroom has one of those windows that won’t close all the way. And no heating!”

“Damn. Morning’s gonna be fun.”

“I had to use the hairdryer on my whole body! Anything on TV?”

“Typical Saturday night stuff. Crime Investigation Murder Team or whatever. Couple of movies. We got  _It’s a Wonderful Life_ or  _Miracle on 34th Street_.”

The sound out of my mouth was something between a groan and a growl. “Oh God! Can I borrow a book?”

* * *

_December 17th_

“Oh come on!” Dean hollered. He had beeped the horn more in the previous two hours than I had ever heard in all the time I’d been riding in his backseat.

“It’s no good beeping, Dean, they can’t move. It’s total gridlock.”

Although Sam was completely correct, Dean seemed to find this contribution more aggravating. He leant on the horn for a full two seconds, shouting “I KNOW SAM!” at the top of his lungs.

“Wow… that was mature…” I muttered.

“Don’t you start too,” Dean said, turning around to face me. “New rule. Driver beeps the horn as much as he wants, everyone else shuts the hell up!”

It had been two hours and we had only moved a few hundred metres. Everyone was irritable and I probably wasn’t the only one who kinda needed to pee.

But I’d appointed myself responsible for morale and stopping those boys killing each other, so maybe this was a situation for what Sam called “aggressive optimism”.

“Hey, who knows when it’s gonna clear? Could be soon. Why don’t we turn on the radio?” We’d gone through both sides of Motorhead and had started the second side of a Zeppelin cassette, and great music though it was, it obviously wasn’t helping.

“A traffic report will just piss Dean off more,” Sam said. “They always do.”

Dean muttered agreement.

“Well, it depends how you look at it!” I said. “Even if it’s bad news, you can use that to plan a strategy. Maybe if we turn off somewhere, that’ll help. Or it could be clearing up soon. Either way, we can plan if we know everything, right?”

“Right,” Dean said. “You got a point.”

He reached over and ejected the cassette from the radio. Zeppellin stopped suddenly, replaced by something much much worse than a bad traffic report.

_Frosty the Snowman was alive as he could be and the children say…_

Crap.

* * *

_December 19th_

The sounds from the bathroom were horrific. It sounded like Dean was possessed. And not in a realistic black-eyed kind of way. More like in  _The Exorcist_ , with the hacking and the groaning and the swearing. Possibly the head spinning too. Definitely the gross part.

I pushed the door open carefully and tiptoed in.

“Hey… how’s it going, sweetie?”

“Ah, I feel like crap, Ellie…” said Dean, clinging onto the toilet as though it were a life raft. “I think I’m… Blaaaaaargh!”

Before he could finish the sentence, he was shuddering his way through another vomiting fit. Unable to do anything to help the poor guy, I just put a hand on his back and rubbed up and down softly. It always helped me feel better to know someone cared that I was feeling sick.

It took so much out of him to vomit that he couldn’t even reach up to flush the toilet again and I had to do it for him.

“Sam’ll be back soon,” I said. “He called before, and he’s bringing back something to settle your stomach, and something for the fever too, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, sitting upright again as he got his breath back.

I kept rubbing his back. You’re never too old to want the soothing feeling of someone who cares about you. Not when you’re sick.

“You can’t have much left in there,” I said. “It’ll be better once your stomach’s empty. You want me to get you anything? Some water, get the taste out of your mouth?”

“Yeah,” he said, still trying to regain some breath. “Thanks, Princess.” It wasn’t an insult anymore. It was just a nickname.

“Anytime,” I said, getting back on my feet. “I know how crappy it is being sick. You just stay there, and I’ll get you some water, okay?”

“Ellie?”

“Yup?”

“I’m sorry I vomited on your blankets. And your pillow.”

I smiled. It was pretty gross, but it could all be washed, and Sam had promised to take everything straight to the laundromat after he got back with Dean’s medicines.

“Aw, honey, don’t even worry about it. Just try to feel better okay.”

“Where’d you get so good at this?” he asked. “Your mom good at this stuff?”

“Probably,” I said, with a shrug, and hurrying out to get the water before he asked any further questions.

* * *

_December 21st_

It rang five times before he answered. He was probably upstairs. It was getting late.

“Hello?” I hadn’t heard his gruff voice in so long. I’d never gone so long without speaking to my father. Never. Just hearing him was like being at home.

“Hi, Daddy…”

“Ellie! Sweetheart, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry I yelled, Dad, I…”

But I couldn’t contain myself anymore. I’d been holding it in since the grocery store and the candy canes. Sam and Dean were out, it was just me, sitting on a bed and talking to my father. It was okay. If it was going to happen, this might as well be the time. I burst into tears…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thankyou is due to the tumblr followers who offered me suggestions for "everyday ordinary" activities to feature in this episode. Of course, they gave me lots of cute suggestions, and I turned them all into reasons for Ellie to be cranky. But I feel bad about it...


	52. Chapter 51: Every Damn Second

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a new case and it may or may not involve Santa's evil brother. And it's bad enough for Ellie being without her Dad at Christmas. Because she remembers.

It wasn’t quite light out yet, but just the tiniest little bit of sun was peeking through the gap in my pink curtains. I lay in bed for a minute, feeling warm and snug and safe under my blankets. Then I opened my eyes real suddenly, as it occurred to me.

_Santa!_

I was still a little wary of my big girl bed, and so I got out the usual way, lying on my tummy and very carefully letting my legs slide down until I could feel the floor under my bare feet. The wooden floorboards were cold, but I was too excited to notice. I crept out of my bedroom and onto the landing. Mama and Daddy slept across the hall, with both doors open. I was so little, but if I peeped, I could just about see my Daddy snoring in bed.

I was big enough to go down the stairs all by myself, but it was still kinda scary. I was real brave, though, and didn’t even need to go down on my butt anymore. I knew how to take the steps one by one, shuffling sideways and holding onto the railings of the bannister with both hands. Left foot down, move hands, right foot down, safe, one step closer to the ground.

Moving that way, I could peep in between the railings, to try and see into the kitchen. Sometimes my Mama would be up this early and today was special, so maybe she’d be there. But I couldn’t see her as I shuffled down, and I couldn’t hear her singing either. Three steps, four steps and I wondered if maybe I should sit and go down the safe way, bouncing myself down each stair. It would be quicker and I’d get to the bottom sooner. But I was proud of being a big girl and even though I really wanted to get down the bottom, I stuck it through the slow way.

Looking down, I got a glimpse of my own pyjamas. They had reindeers on, and that made me remember what my Daddy said. I hoped he would wake up soon to take me outside and look in the snow for the tracks left by Santa. There’d been so much snow all winter, and I liked playing in it. Daddy had taught me to make snowballs, and one time we threw them at Mama.

After what seemed like hours of slow shuffling, my second foot finally touched the rug at the bottom of the stairs and I was safe. It didn’t look like Mama was in the kitchen yet, so I ran through to the living room instead, my tiny feet throwing up a tremendous noise as I galloped across the hall.

And then, before I got into the living room, I woke up. I had to fight to wake up before I got there, every time. It’s hard to explain how I knew. Most of the time, I didn’t know I was dreaming, but somewhere in that space between the bottom of the staircase and the living room, some part of me would sit up screaming and say _No, Ellie!!! You’re dreaming, you’re dreaming it again!!! Wake up! Wake up! Don’t go into that room!_

So I woke up, panting and sweaty, lying on my bedroll on the floor of another crappy motel room. I’d kicked off the blankets and because I’d been drenched in my own sweat, it was freezing. But it was daylight. I could hear that someone was in the shower. Looking up, I saw a lump in Dean’s bed whilst Sam’s was neatly made. So he was the one in the shower, probably forgoing a morning run because it was snowing out. It was always freaking snowing out.

Sam tended to notice little things like a person being drenched in sweat, so I got up and grabbed some clothes to get changed real quick. Dean was fast asleep, but with my back turned to him just in case, I was able to throw on some jeans and a couple of shirts. If he’d woken up he would maybe have seen my naked butt for like three seconds and good for him.

Thankfully, even though I’d sweated all over, my thick hair was still dry except along my forehead and I was easily able to cover that over. When Sam came out of the shower I’d look like I’d had a totally normal night’s sleep, with no nightmares of any kind.

He came out as I was folding the blankets up. It was a shame really. After the restless night I’d had, I could have done with same Naked Winchester Torso, but it being so cold, he’d changed in the bathroom. Maybe Dean would be more obliging.

“Hey, you’re up early,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah. Woke up, and it seemed too late to go back to sleep.”

“Well, we don’t want to go too early, wake that family. Long breakfast, maybe.”

“Sounds good,” I said, with my best cheerful smile. Sam expected me to be somewhat out of it before coffee, so I didn’t need to fake too much.

Once Dean was awake, both the boys got their Fed suits on. I had adopted a new “FBI Contractor” look, something a bit of a step up from my jeans but not full Fed, which always called for an hour of wrestling my hair into submission. I had a nice black pencil skirt and a pink button up shirt, with a collar and everything. I looked totally boring. Then, because of the problem of possibly needing to run, I had found a nice pair of flat soled black boots, that went to just under the knee. Over a pair of black stockings, they had a sufficiently professional feel. I got to wear my hair out, and stuck to just the normal light make-up.

First time I’d worn it, Dean said I looked like “the kind of librarian who’d get naughty between the shelves”. Sam said that librarians like that didn’t exist in the real world, but that I looked pretty and the outfit balanced professional and approachable.

That was a strategy that we’d accidentally discovered worked well. The boys would be all stern FBI with their probing questions and their badges. Meanwhile, I’d be in the background, petting the family cat or comforting the crying widow. And then people would tell me things. They’d just start volunteering information, because I seemed like a nice non-threatening person who might listen or believe them.

After breakfast, we drove to our victim’s house. Guy had disappeared from his house in the night. No sign of forced entry, and everything locked from the inside. Might not have been our kind of thing, but worth checking out, since we’d been in the area anyway.

When we arrived, the wife was not surprised. She had probably spent the whole previous day being interviewed and the FBI on her doorstep first thing in the morning was not a shock. Dean talked to her outside, and she said it was okay for Sam to look around the house. Seeing a little girl peering out from behind her, I went inside too.

She was maybe nine, and she stared out the window at her mother while Sam got to work searching the house for anything weird.

“Your mom won’t be long,” I told the girl. “My friends are from the FBI and they just need to ask about your dad.”

She turned around to look at me. “I don’t really believe in Santa,” she said. “Not really.”

I wasn’t sure how that was relevant to her father’s disappearance, or even if it was. The last thing I ever wanted to talk about was Santa. But that didn’t matter. My discomfort was irrelevant. This little girl had lost her dad and if she wanted to talk about Santa, then we were damn well gonna talk about him.

“Did you used to?” I asked.

She nodded. “When I was little. But… I heard him on the roof.”

“When you were little?” I asked.

“No. The other night. When Daddy went away. I heard Santa, on the roof. Mom says I imagined it.”

Well, it definitely wasn’t Santa, but she might very well have heard _something_ on the roof. I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head that might climb into a house via the roof and abduct a man, but there could be something.

“What did it sound like?” I asked.

“Like… a bang and a long scrape. You know… the sleigh landing.”

I could barely remember what I’d been told about Santa, but I was pretty sure my Daddy had told me he would land outside in our yard. Different families probably told it different.

“What does Santa do, if you’ve been naughty?” asked the child.

I actually wasn’t sure. I was hardly an expert on Santa, having shunned the whole concept from four years old. We didn’t tell stories about magical men who brought presents. Not in our house. Nobody in the world is going to give out free presents to every kid. People just ain’t like that.

“Um… Maybe he just doesn’t bring you a present?” I asked.

She shuffled on the spot, looking back out the window at her mother, and then back at me. Moving from one foot to the other, I could see there was something she wanted to say. Maybe something she’d tried to tell her mother. Sometimes in these weird cases, kids would get dismissed as imaginative or distraught and delusional. But in my experience, children just didn’t have the cynicism yet to ignore what they’d seen or heard. They hadn’t learned to dismiss their own experiences the way adults do with things that don’t seem to make sense.

I crouched down so my face was closer to her height.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Hailey.”

“I’m Ellie,” I told her. “And I believe a lot of weird things, Hailey. So… if you have anything you want to tell me, even if your mom says it isn’t real, I promise I’ll believe you.”

She still seemed anxious, looking back out at her mom again. Then she took two little steps closer to me, and in a very low voice, she asked “If my daddy had done something naughty… would Santa take him away?”

 

* * *

 

On the way back to the car, Dean asked Sam and I if we’d found anything. Before I could decide how to word it, Sam answered first.

“Stocking, mistletoe… this,” he handed something very small to Dean, who took one quick look and then gave it to me. It was a tooth.

“A tooth? Where was this?” Dean asked.

I wasn’t an expert, but it looked too big to be a child’s tooth. There was blood on it. It didn’t seem like it could be one of Hailey’s.

“In the chimney,” Sam said.

“Chimney?” Dean asked. “No way a man fits up a chimney. It’s too narrow.”

“No way he fits up in one piece,” Sam corrected him. Ew.

I sure hoped we were dealing with some kind of monster, cos the thought of a human sneaking down chimneys and hacking grown men down small enough to drag them back up was horrifying. Give me a monster over a human any day.

“His daughter reckons Santa took him away,” I said, as we got to the car. “Because he was naughty.”

Sam stopped walking to look at me. I handed him back the tooth. “Naughty?” he asked.

“Well, she’s only nine and one quarter, but Hailey reckons her father did something real bad that made her mom cry. She heard them arguing. Sounded like an affair to me, but whatever it was, Hailey thinks it was real naughty.”

“Yeah, but… Santa doesn’t cut a guy up and take him up the chimney,” Dean said, as he unlocked the car.

“Something else might,” I said.

“Hailey see anything?” Sam asked.

I shook my head. “But she says she heard a thump and a scraping sound on the roof. Sounded like Santa’s sleigh landing. Her mom told her she imagined it.”

“That’s funny, cos mom told me _she_ heard a thump,” said Dean.

“She was probably trying to calm the kid down,” Sam said. “Probably trying to make it less traumatising so she won’t remember it later.”

I accidentally let out a scoff. “Kids remember, Sam. It doesn’t matter what you tell ‘em. Something awful goes down… They remember.”

“Well whatever. You two better hit the books,” Dean said. “Find out what takes cheating husbands up the chimney.”

 

* * *

 

A couple of hours later, Sam and I were side by side on the extremely tacky green sofa in our room. He had his laptop on the coffee table, while I had mine up on my knees. We’d both been searching for possible culprits and, well… it was kind of stupid.

“I am not drunk enough for this shit,” I said, finally. “Fucking Evil Santa, are you kidding me? It’s not enough to teach your kid that some magic fat dude is gonna come into your house and eat the cookie tribute you have to leave like some freakin’ pagan ritual, but now he’s got a belligerent brother who’s gonna drag you away and eat you if you’re naughty!? What the hell, Sam?”

“Uh, Ellie…”

“It’s messed up!”

Sam reached across the sofa, took the laptop off my knees and moved it onto the coffee table. “Ellie? Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I lied. “I mean… I’m a little irritated by this case, but I’m totally…”

“Uh huh,” said Sam, doubt in his voice and his eyes. “So, you haven’t been unusually moody lately?”

I probably had, but not on purpose. I was just used to being able to spend the whole horrific month of December as a virtual hermit, locked in the house with my dad and only going out when strictly necessary. Instead I was on the road, and every damn place I looked it was Christmas this and Santa that and so much freakin’ snow everywhere! It was the jolly holly mistletoe shit making me cranky. That was all.

“I dunno, maybe,” I said.

“Is it… Are you sure you don’t want to go home for Christmas? We’ve got a couple of days.”

“No!” I snapped.

I can imagine how that would go down. “Hi Daddy, I came home for Christmas because love and family and joy.” And then my father would probably shoot me in the ass.

“Pea, if something’s bothering you…”

“I’m fine!!!” I insisted, getting up off the sofa as I yelled. I had nowhere to go, but I couldn’t sit there anymore, trying to justify why I didn’t want to be cheerful every damn minute. A person isn’t allowed to be moody occasionally? “Just… leave me alone!”

For the lack of anywhere else to go, I stormed into the bathroom, slamming and locking the door behind me. Okay… so I was in the bathroom now. My cell phone and my computer were both back outside with Sam. Plus there were tears starting to well up and I couldn’t breathe properly.

It was hard. I hadn’t expected it to be this hard. Because we didn’t do Christmas, I didn’t think it would matter that I was away from my father. We didn’t treat it any differently from any other day, so I figured I could just power through it. Sam and Dean didn’t celebrate either, according to Sam, which was fantastic. Just an ordinary day for everyone. It wasn’t like I was actually _scared_ anymore. Just irritated.

Except I’d forgotten that just because we didn’t treat it like _Christmas_ that didn’t mean it was the same as any other day. Not for me and Dad. It was still important, and at least when I was at home, as I had been every single year, I had my father and there was a strength in us being together. I could be cranky and sad, and no one would judge me for it, because they’d know why. If I was feeling really low, I had someone to watch a bad movie with me, or eat every potato chip in South Dakota.

Apparently, Christmas _was_ a time to be with your family. Even if the way your family spent Christmas was to hate it. At least we hated it together.

Look how unpleasant it was making me! I didn’t need to shout at Sam like that. He was just checking I was alright, because he cared about me. Now he was probably worried, thinking he’d done something horribly wrong, when really, he was just a sweet ball of sunshine and I was a bitch. Poor guy.

Well, I was sure about one thing. I wasn’t going to cry again. I was going to take this, breathe deep, and get through it. It was the twenty-second of December and I only had three days to go. When I’d finally called my Dad the night before, he’d told me I could do it. He said I was strong and brave and there was nothing I couldn’t handle.

I just had to try and be as strong as my Dad thought I was. I could always call again if I had to. There were parts I couldn’t tell him. He didn’t need to know about the dream, but we could talk about the rest. He could help me remember how to breathe.

I sat on the floor of the bathroom, with my back against the door. I don’t even know how long for. I steadied my breathing. In my head, I went over ways of apologising to Sam. I tried to name all the states, but I kept forgetting which ones I’d already thought of. I thought of more ways to tell Sam I was sorry. I didn’t cry.

It was silent outside for a while, but then I heard Dean’s voice. Occasionally, I’d hear one of the guys or the other. I definitely heard Dean say “There is no Santa!” which suggested that Sam’s explanation of what we’d found out about Krampus and Black Peter and all the other lore about anti-Santas was not going down that well.

Not long after, there was a soft knock at the door. “Ellie? You okay in there, sweetheart?”

It was Dean, sounding very cautious. Sam had obviously told him about my little tantrum.

“Sure!” I called back. “Uh… I just felt kinda sick. But I’m okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”

I went to the toilet, then flushed it and washed my hands, so it would at least sound like I’d been doing something other than sit and think. I didn’t know why I didn’t just go out and be straight with them. _Sam, Dean… I really hate Christmas because when I was a little girl…_ Nope! No! I couldn’t even bring myself to _think_ the words that would explain it all.

When I came out, the boys were sprawled around in a ready-to-go sort of way. Dean was leaning over the back of the sofa, looking at the pictures on my laptop screen. Sam sat on the bed, just staring at his hands.

“Okay! I’m fine,” I said, doing my best to smile. “Are we going somewhere?”

Dean took the cue from me, and got straight into talking about business. “So, Sam says you guys found some stuff about Santa’s brother. Shady guy, punishes the wicked.”

“Yep,” I said. “I mean… it sounds kinda mad… but could be a real thing? Not the Santa part, but that could be the lore pasted on after, like people do.”

“Well… we got another guy disappeared this month, too. Same deal. Everything locked, thump on the roof.”

Okay. Two cases in such a small town in one month was definitely worth looking into. It was going to suck, but I was a big girl and I could handle it. “So, who was he?”

“Suburban dad, nice family, nothing shady,” Dean said. “No dirt on him that I heard about.”

“Okay… so, maybe there’s something no one knew. Or maybe adultery dad wasn’t taken up the chimney cos of that?”

Dean shrugged. “Well, there is a connection. Both victims went to the same place before they got taken. So we’re gonna go check it out. You coming?”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s head out. Sam?”

Sam had been sitting on the bed the whole time. It didn’t seem like he’d taken in our conversation at all. He looked distracted. I hoped he wasn’t worried about how upset I’d been. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

Dean started walking straight across the carpark, while I hung back a little and waited for Sam. As he came level with me, we started walking slowly together, side by side.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have got mad at you.”

He gave me a smile, with just the slightest hint of his dimples, and that crinkle in his forehead. “It’s okay. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

God, he was so nice to me. After I’d yelled at him for trying to look after me, he just accepted a vague apology and went right back to trying to help. How does a person get that kind?

I shook my head. “No thanks. I’m… I’m not really fine, Sam. But I don’t want to talk about it. I appreciate you caring but I just… I wanna handle it on my own.”

His jaw clicked to the side a little, but I had yet to figure out what that meant. It was sort of a thinking thing, but there seemed to be more to it than that. He just did it sometimes. It might have meant he was worried, but I couldn’t quite read him.

“Okay. But if you want to talk, I’m here.”

I smiled, and that time I didn’t even have to fake it.

 

* * *

 

I really should have asked Dean where we were going before I agreed to it. Both our victims had taken their kids to visit Santa’s Village. It was kind of lame. I didn’t know what I thought Santa’s Village ought to look like, but I expected something a bit more sophisticated. There were big wooden cut outs staked into the dirt, and some guys dressed up as reindeer and elves. They looked so bored. A couple of trees had coloured lights draped over them. It seemed like someone had done their best on a budget.

“What are they supposed to be?” I asked, pointing to some wooden figures. Three guys in flowing robes and turbans, looking like they were dressed for the desert? That wasn’t very Christmas.

“The Three Kings,” Sam said. I stared at him blankly. “With gifts. For baby Jesus.”

“Oh, yeah, right!” I said, with a smile that I hoped hid my confusion.

I actually didn’t know very much about Christmas. Some of it you can’t avoid, when you’re at school and the whole of December is about gearing up for it. I got Santa coming and giving presents, and I got the part where your whole family gets together, which for most people meant Grandparents and Uncles and Aunts and things like that. I got snow and snowmen, and I didn’t really understand why Santa had reindeer, but I knew he did and there was definitely one of them who had a red nose.

My classmates used to make Christmas decorations and stuff, when I was real little, but I never participated. Dad arranged it with the teachers that I didn’t have to do it, and I got to go and sit in the office with a colouring book. That’s where I made friends with Sara, cos her parents were very strict Jewish. She told me about Hanukkah and I knew about that already because of Dad’s friend Rufus. Anytime there was a lesson that had anything to do with Christmas, I was allowed to sit out and do colouring. I wasn’t in the Christmas pageant either. My dad had been real firm about it.

I asked him once, when I was older and we were sitting rugged up in the study one December twenty-fifth, drinking a lot of beer. I just wondered if I’d ever shown any interest in being in the pageant and making the decorations and doing the fun stuff with the other kids, and what he’d told me about why he wouldn’t allow it.

He’d explained that it had nothing to do with him not _letting_ me do Christmas stuff. If it had been up to him, he’d have done his best and tried to make Christmas fun for me. It was a hard time for him, but he’d have draped the house and yard in lights and got a tree for every room if it made me happy. It was me. That awful first year, he’d tried to get me interested in snow and lights and the fact that Santa was coming, but I just cried and screamed and begged him to keep Santa away, and not to make me go out in the snow.

When I was in kindergarten, Dad got called to go up to the hospital. We’d been making paper snowmen and I’d erupted into hysterics, and none of the teachers could calm me down. They’d called an ambulance, because they thought it must be some kind of fit. He said when he got to the hospital, I was still screaming and crying. I was in that part of the ER where they put kids, so it was decorated for Christmas. I guess most kids like to look at pictures of Santa and stuff. Anyway, I wailed and shook and sobbed so hysterically that even my Dad couldn’t understand what I was saying. The Doctors were just explaining to Dad that they might have no choice but to dope his four year old up on sedatives. But I kept pointing at the walls, and he had this sudden horrified realisation. He told them to move me into a different part of ER. A grown up part, where there were no reindeer or snowmen or Christmas trees.

And bingo. Little Ellie stopped screaming and settled down into a more manageable soft crying. Finding nothing was wrong with me physically, they brought out the child psychiatrist to talk to me. It was obvious what I was so upset about, and why I didn’t like the Christmas decorations. But they wanted to see what I remembered, so they could help me by giving me therapy.

I told the doctors I didn’t remember anything. I told my daddy I didn’t remember anything. Years of therapy and I always _always_ said I didn’t remember anything.

Because I didn’t know that Dad knew the truth. I didn’t even really understand what I’d seen. But I knew, even then, that there are some things grown-ups just won’t believe.

“I know you don’t remember,” Dad had said, all those years later. “Thank God you don’t remember. But I think it’s in there somewhere, buried in your brain. And the snow and the decorations just bring it out again. Maybe you don’t remember what happened, but I think you remember how scared you were.”

Twenty-two years later and my Dad still didn’t know. I remembered every damn second.


	53. Chapter 52: Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tired and cranky Ellie is not sure she can give her all to this case. But she tries her best, until she falls asleep.

Dean was looking around as he walked, hands in his pockets to protect them from the chill. I stopped staring at the three wooden kings so I could catch up. I had to skip a little to get back into pace with him, while Sam just walked normally on his freakishly long legs. For all I knew, he might have been walking slow.

“It does kind of lend credence to the theory, don’t it?” said Dean.

I thought so. If Santa’s evil brother were anywhere, it would probably be in a miserable Christmas display full of tacky decorations and pissed off elves.

“Yeah, but anti-Claus?” asked Sam. “Couldn’t be.”

“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Dean said. “Hey! Speaking of, we should have one this year.”

Oh God. God please no.

“Have one what?” asked Sam.

Dean stared as if he couldn’t believe his brother hadn’t understood him. “A Christmas.”

Sam made a very dismissive sound. “No thanks.”

Come to think of it, pretty much every mention of Christmas cheer or holiday spirit I had heard from the boys had come out of Dean. I hadn’t really noticed before, but Sam had barely mentioned Christmas. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who hated it.

But Dean was still enthusiastic. “No, we’ll get a tree, a little Boston market, just like when we were little.”

“Dean, those weren’t exactly Hallmark memories for me, you know.”

I was surprised by that. While I was not a huge fan of John Winchester, I figured he at least spent some time with his sons at Christmas. He wasn’t a great dad like mine, but he kept his kids with him, so it stood to reason he’d want to make the holidays nice for them. That was what parents did, wasn’t it?

“What are you talking about?” Dean sounded so surprised. “We had some great Christmases!”

“Whose childhood are you talking about?”

Weird how they could have such totally different memories of how it was for them as kids. There was only four years between them. Maybe it was because of the different ways they related to their dad. I was only a kid myself, but it always seemed to me like Dean kind of worshipped his father. He was only too happy to follow in his footsteps, as far as I could tell. He wanted to be a great hunter like his father and whatever else I thought of John, I knew he was a great hunter. But Sam used to sit on my bed and cry that he thought his father hated him. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his father. He did, but he desperately wanted to be loved back and he never felt like he was.

I guess a difference like that would have to give them different perspectives. Maybe Dean remembered only the good times and Sam remembered only the bad.

“Tell him, Ellie,” Dean urged me. “You wanna have Christmas, right?”

I tried to open my mouth but found I couldn’t breathe so well. Fortunately, Sam was so insistent that he interrupted before I would have said anything.

“No! Just… no.”

It didn’t seem like either of them had noticed the blood draining out of my face. I took a few deep breaths in through the nose and out through my mouth, as Dean wandered off.

“Alright, Grinch,” he said.

As I stood there, trying to breathe properly, I realised Sam wasn’t moving. But he wasn’t looking at me, either. He was staring off into the middle distance, not saying anything. Ordinarily, I’d have checked to see if he was okay, but I was not okay myself. Dean had asked me about Christmas, tried to get me on his side against Sam and he was bound to try it again. What was I going to do? What could I say?

Maybe I could just shrug it off, be all casual. Like I didn’t really care about it either way, but if it bothered Sam we shouldn’t do it. Could that work?

I kept breathing the cold air, nice and slow. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Calm. It had been a long time since I’d had to worry about it this much. I got taught how to cope when I was a little kid. Calm, steady breathing. I had to repeat little mantras to myself.  _You are safe. You don’t need to be scared. Christmas can’t hurt you._   _Snow won’t hurt you._

It wasn’t even the thought of Christmas making me anxious. I was over that, and the therapy worked, I guess. I still hated it and all, but I no longer believed that Christmas itself was going to lead to me getting hurt. I had grown up enough to process that it happened  _at_ Christmas, not _because of_  Christmas. The fear was more that I would be asked probing questions and I’d be forced to talk about it.

While I was breathing, Dean did a stroll up to the opposite end of the little fenced-in “Village” and then came back. He said something to us, but I didn’t take it in at all.

“Huh?” I asked, as Sam started moving again, taking a step forward to stand beside his brother. I quickly joined them.

“Nothing. What are we looking for, again?”

Sam looked around as we started walking. He was kind of taking the lead, moving us down the pebbly walkway towards the little red house where the fake Santa was sitting. “Um, lore says the anti-Claus will walk with a limp.”

“And he’ll smell like sweets,” I added. I remembered that part pretty clearly cos it was so gross.

“Great. So we’re looking for a pimp Santa,” said Dean. He turned to look at me. “Why the sweets?”

“So the kids come closer,” I told him.

Dean pulled a face quite similar to the one I’d made when I read it. “That’s creepy. How does this thing know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice?”

That had not been in any of the books or websites Sam and I had found. He looked across at me, but I shrugged. “We don’t know,” he told Dean.

We stopped a little way off from the guy dressed as Santa. The few times I’d been able to stomach walking past a mall Santa, they’d had a big gold throne and lots of fake snow and a fir tree. This guy was just sitting on a little stool in front of the rustic looking wooden cottage. It said “Nearly The North Pole” on it and was painted all red and white, but it was getting old and the paint was scuffed.

All the same, the kids seemed okay with it. A mom was just helping her son up the step to meet Santa, and two girls were waiting with their own mother.

“So, Ronnie, come sit on Santa’s knee. There you go…”

Santa sounded like he smoked as least four packs a day, and had a weird sort of leer to his voice that reminded me of the drunkest creeps who’d ever hit on me in dingy bars.

“You been a good boy this year?”

“Yeah,” said little Ronnie.

That don’t really make sense. Why would you ask a kid if they’ve been well behaved? Of course they’ll say yes, especially if there’s presents in it. No kid’s gonna tell the truth and admit they were naughty. That would stiff them out of the presents.

“Good,” Santa said. “Santa’s got a special gift for you.” The way he cackled made me very concerned about what the hell kind of gift it was. This guy sounded like someone who shouldn’t be allowed to work with children. Or anyone, possibly.

“Maybe we do,” Dean said.

Apparently, Ronnie’s mom had similar concerns to me, as she quickly stepped up and took her son’s arm, leading him away.

We were approached by a short woman, with an elf costume on. What a horrible job, having to wear that awful costume. And work with that creepy-ass Santa. I hoped she was well-paid.

“Welcome to Santa’s court,” she said. “Can I escort your child to Santa?”

Crap. Sam and I just looked awkward, but Dean chuckled. “No. No. Uh… but actually, my brother here, it’s been a lifelong dream of his.”

Sam’s face was the physical embodiment of murder.

“Uh, sorry,” said the Elf-lady, her tone somewhere between confused and grossed out. “No kids over twelve…”

“No, he’s just kidding,” said Sam, with that flustered, awkward accidental cuteness of his. “We only came here to watch.”

_Oh God, honey, no!_  I thought, but I was too late to do anything about it. He’d already said it. I tried to give my most sweet, cheerful, definitely not creepy smile, but it didn’t do any good. All she saw was two grown men apparently interested in watching children. Having a woman with them did not help.

“Ew,” she said, before walking away.

That was when Sam realised what he’d said. “I… I didn’t mean that we came here to wa… you…” It was no good calling after her. She was hurrying away. Possibly to call the police, if we were really unlucky.

“Thanks a lot, Dean. Thanks for that.”

Dean just laughed, as I kept looking over at Santa. He was done doing whatever it was he did, and had gotten off his stool. Then he started heading away from his hut, towards us. He was limping. I nudged Dean, a little harder than I needed to, for poor Sam’s sake.

“Look,” I hissed.

The boys were behind me, so I couldn’t see if they were watching as Santa moved towards us, but they had certainly gone quiet. It looked like he was heading out on a break or something. As he walked past us, he looked me up and down with a leer. This was my first experience with a guy dressed as Santa, and I gotta say, it was not doing anything to make me feel better. He stank, too. Kind of like burnt sugar? Caramel?

Once he was gone, Dean pulled my arm to turn me round and we all huddled a little closer to one another.

“A lot of people walk with limps, right?” Sam said.

I wasn’t sure. “He  _did_ smell kinda like candy.”

“That was Ripple,” Sam said. “I think. Had to be.”

Dean shrugged. “Maybe. We’re willing to take that chance?”

No. As ridiculous as the whole concept of Santa’s evil brother was, we definitely had to work on the assumption that he might be real.

“Okay, so we stock up on supplies, come back right before closing,” I said. “We wait in the carpark, we can maybe follow him home?”

“Well, I don’t have any better ideas. Sam?”

Sam shook his head, so Dean led the way out of Santa’s Village and back to the Impala. It was time for an old-fashioned stakeout.

* * *

We headed out, went back to the motel to pick up all our notes on anti-Claus and get the thermos and other stuff we’d need for a stakeout. By the time we had all that stuff together, it was getting on to four o’clock and my lack of sleep was starting to catch up with me. I’d been having nightmares for most of the month, and that was probably as much of a contributing factor in my moodiness as being subjected carols and decorations.

“Listen, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be a nightmare to be stuck in a car with all night,” I said. “How about you guys follow Santa home and I’ll stay here, be your base camp. You can ring if you need me to look anything up.”

“What if he’s our guy and we need you?” Dean asked.

“Well… if he is our guy, you maybe don’t want to go after him yet anyway, since we don’t know how to kill him. But I can look into that while you’re gone? Maybe come up with something?”

I didn’t know if he was taking me at face value, or if he was picking up that I was tired and not feeling up to it, but either way, Sam agreed that might be more helpful than just hanging around with them as a third body in the car.

They went without me, and promised to call if they needed me. Meanwhile, I could do some more research into some of these pagan concepts of an anti-Santa. I could just order in a pizza and get some serious work done. It wasn’t my favourite subject, but at least if I was going back far into pagan beliefs, I’d be reading about mid-winter festivals rather than Christmas. A little less jingle bells, and a little more animal sacrifice.

And I’m gonna be honest with you. I really didn’t think that through.

* * *

I made it all the way to the bottom of the stairs, moving one at a time, clinging onto those railings. Mama had told me that when Santa came, he’d leave the presents under the Christmas tree. I wasn’t supposed to open them until later, but I just wanted to look. Would they be big presents or little ones? How many would there be? Maybe one would be a Barbie! Or even better… A puppy! I had begged and begged for a puppy and Daddy always said no, but maybe Santa would bring me one. If he brought it, then Daddy would have to let me keep it!

I had been super good for the whole entire year. Mama was always telling me I was a good girl. And Mama and Daddy were good too, so Santa would just  _have_  to bring them what they wanted, wouldn’t he? There was only one way to find out. I ran across the hall.

And then, I didn’t wake up. Instead, I skipped into the living room, stopping with surprise when I got inside.

“Mama!”

I hadn’t been able to see her in the kitchen before, but now I’d found her. She was at the bench by the window, looking out into the yard as she stirred something in a little bowl.

“Mama! Mama! Did Santa come?”

“What are you doing awake so early?” she asked, her voice seemed harsh, like she was angry with me. Mama was almost never angry.

I stopped still in the doorway, not sure if I should go closer. I wanted her to pick me up and hug me but if she was mad at me maybe she didn’t want to. “I wanted’a see Santa,” I said, biting my lip. Was I in trouble?

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Well… I can take you outside to see Santa, but we gotta do it before your father wakes up, okay?”

I looked up again, my mouth open in joy. Was Santa still here? Even though it was daytime? “Santa!”

Mama put her bowl down, and came into the living room. I watched her walk past me, holding my arms out wide, but she still didn’t pick me up. As she walked past the Christmas tree, I noticed it, though. It was so tall, bigger than my Daddy, even! He’d had to stretch up to put the angel on. He let me hold her first and I got to help hang the other decorations.

Now there were presents under the tree! Red ones and green ones and lots with reindeers on the paper. I loved reindeers. Now Mama was going to take me to see them. She went to the desk first, and picked something up.

“You have to get dressed first,” she said. “I have a special dress for you to wear. It’s very important.”

She unfolded it to show me. It was real pretty. All white, with lace on the bottom. I reached out to touch it and she got down to my level so I could. The white cloth was all shiny and smooth. I was real excited to wear it, so I held my arms up and let her get my pyjamas off, so she could put the pretty dress on instead.

“We gonna see reindeers?” I asked, as she slipped the dress over my head.

“Yes. Right outside,” Mama told me. I was dressed now and I held my arms wide for a hug again, but she still didn’t pick me up. Daddy said I was getting too big to be carried all the time. Maybe that was why.

“Wait here for me,” she said.

I didn’t want to get in trouble and not get to go outside and see Santa and the reindeers, so I did exactly what she said. I stayed in that one spot and didn’t move at all. I was looking at the presents under the tree and I really wanted to go over to them and touch them. I couldn’t tell if any of them was a puppy. But maybe Santa had my puppy? Was that why we were going outside to see him?

I was just so excited that by the time Mama came back, I was bouncing on my toes. It was sad that Daddy couldn’t come too, but I could tell him later. How big were reindeers? Would I get to pet one? Maybe I could even ride one!

Mama had something in one of her hands, but with her other, she reached down. I put my little hand into hers, and still bouncing, I looked up at her. “Reindeers now!?” I asked, squealing loudly.

“Shh!” she hissed. “We can’t wake your father up, remember.”

She sounded very angry, so I bit down on my lip real hard and nodded my head. I forgot that part. But we were still going, weren’t we? I was so close to meeting Santa and his reindeers now and I couldn’t bear it if I didn’t get to.

But it was all okay. I wasn’t in too much trouble, because she led me out into the hall and towards the back door. When she opened it wide, I got so cold. I didn’t have no shoes on, and my dress wasn’t real warm. But there was so much snow all over the yard. The cars were all covered, and the ground was just fluffy white.

It was very exciting about the snow, but looking around, I couldn’t see any reindeers. Not even a sleigh.

“Where Santa?” I asked, looking up at Mama.

But she didn’t answer me, just let go of my hand to shut the door behind us. Then she gripped me again, real tight, like for crossing the road. She pulled me along the porch and down the stairs. She was going too fast for my little legs and it was hard for me to keep up. But if I had to hurry, then I was gonna hurry! I couldn’t miss out. But why was Mama so strange? Was it because she was excited too?

My bare feet were so cold. The snow covered my foot and ankle with each step and it was hard to walk through, especially when we were going so fast. I didn’t dare complain, but as willing as my mind was to do anything, it was too much for my little body. I lost my grip on my Mama’s hand and fell forward into a sludgy patch of snow. My face landed and hit the ground in front of me, and it hurt.

I wanted to see reindeers, but I didn’t want to be cold and I didn’t want my Mama to be so strange and not hug me. And my head was sore where I had bump-ded it. I started to cry.

Trying to pick myself up and out of the snow like a big girl, I found it was slippery, and it was still so cold. My sobbing got louder.

Then a hand reached down, and I thought my Mama would surely pick me up and help me. I was crying and I’d hurt my head! Mama would help me. But the hand got hold of my hair, and I squealed from the pain as she pulled me upright.

When she had me standing again, she looked down into my face.

“Stop screeching, you little brat! Now, come on and keep your mouth shut.”

It was real weird, and it was hard to see through my tears. But I was sure that something wasn’t right. Because Mama’s eyes were totally black.


	54. Chapter 53: Loaded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After her horrible dream, Ellie needs to go out and blow off some steam. But this time, Sam is not her drinking buddy.

I screamed so loudly that the sound of my own voice jolted me awake. Startled, I sat straight upright, looking around me. I was on the sofa in our motel. My laptop was on the coffee table beside me. I’d been looking at some websites about pagan rituals and sacrifices and then I’d just closed my eyes for a second. I must have fallen asleep. In a snowy December. After reading about sacrificial rituals. How freakin’ stupid was I? No wonder I had woken up screaming.

It took me a moment or two to remember that I wasn’t three years old, and another to realise where I was and what had happened. But it was in the fourth moment that I saw I wasn’t alone. Sam and Dean were sitting at the table nearby, and both of them were staring at me.

“Shit…” I murmured to myself, wiping the sweaty hair back from my face. “Shit…”

Both Winchesters were across the room and beside me in a moment. Dean came around to lean over the sofa back, while Sam crouched down so his head was level with mine.

“Ellie, what happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?” He had that little concern crinkle above his nose, and the puppy look in his eyes. Jesus. I couldn’t explain this in any way that wouldn’t worry him.

Even Dean was worried, as his hand went on my shoulder.

“I’m fine…” I said. “I just… it was a nightmare…”

“No kidding,” Dean said. “What the hell were you dreaming about?”

“I can’t…” I started to get up off the sofa. “I gotta go to the bathroom!”

Sam had to manoeuvre out of my way as I leapt up and bolted to freedom. I locked the door behind me and sat down on the floor again.

It was just a dream, a nightmare… Okay, it was a  _memory_ , but it was way in the past and it couldn’t hurt me now. The demon that had been in my mom, and I knew now that’s what it was, was long gone. Rufus had exorcized it. A little late, but he’d showed up eventually and sent it right back to Hell. Of course… a whole bunch of demons had recently escaped from Hell, so it was entirely possible that whatever it was  _could_  come back and hurt me. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t thought of that.

My Dad had probably thought of that. Maybe that had something to do with his reluctance to let me leave him and go out hunting alone. He didn’t know that I knew. But I was probably safe. Whatever that thing had wanted me for, it was time sensitive and anyway, I was probably no good now. White dress and all, there was likely an element of the virginal to the whole thing and I was well and truly out of contention for any ritual requiring a virgin.

No… I was safe. The demon wasn’t going to come after me, and even if it did, I knew how to defend myself. It was an extremely unpleasant memory, but it wasn’t happening right then and there. I just needed to take some deep breaths, calm myself down… and maybe go and get really freakin’ drunk.

I turned on the cold tap, ran my hands under it for a moment and then splashed some water onto my face. It was a shock and it cleared my head up, scaring away all those fresh images of snow and black eyes. Then I took a look in the mirror. I looked okay. I just needed to run the brush through my hair a few times and maybe put on something to cover the blotchy skin on my forehead. I didn’t need to go nuts, but a strategically chosen outfit and the right lipstick and I’d be okay. It was Christmas. Lots of people drink at Christmas. Probably plenty of dudes hanging around in bars who would jump at the chance to help me take my mind somewhere else for thirty minutes.

When I came back out, both the boys were watching me cautiously. Sam sat on the sofa, looking over his shoulder at me, still with those damn puppy eyes. Dean was leaning against the wall and his expression was harder to read, but he was definitely watching me come out of the bathroom and head for my bag.

“So… what happened with anti-Claus?” I asked.

“Creepy old drunk,” Dean said. “Not our guy.”

Bless Dean. It may have been frustrating at times that he refused to talk about his feelings or engage in any discussion about personal stuff, but at least he knew what it looked like when someone didn’t want to talk.

Rummaging through my bag, I looked for a better top than the one I was wearing, and put my make-up bag aside as well. “So… we’re back to square one?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” Sam said. “You find anything?”

“Nope. I did try, though,” I added. “Before I fell asleep. Sorry.”

“No problem,” Dean said.

I found a green button up that showed off a lot of cleavage and grabbed it. As I got up, I waved it so they could both see it. “It’s still early,” I said. “I’m going out for a drink.”

But there was no way I was going to get away with that. I didn’t know what they talked about while I was getting changed and fixing my face, but when I came out, Dean had his keys in his hand.

“Seriously?” I whined. “I’m not sixteen.”

“Come on, Princess. We’re dealing with the evil Santa here. Plus I just saw Santa watching porn in his underwear. You think I don’t need a drink too?”

“Just one or two,” I said. “I’m designating you driver.”

“Fine by me. You coming, Sam?”

He shook his head, and pointed to his computer. “I’ll stay here, see if I can find anything new. You guys have fun though.”

* * *

We found a little bar near the college. It wasn’t crowded, but it was the kind of place you could sit and drink without anybody bothering you. It also had an overwhelmingly male clientele, which sucked for Dean, but increased my chances of picking up. Dean would just have to be content with being my wingman and driving me home.

We ordered a couple of beers and sat down at the bar, side by side.

“Remember Rule Five goes both ways,” I muttered.

He stared at me. “Huh?”

“Don’t you freakin’ dare look like my boyfriend.”

He smirked and took a sip of his beer. “You got it, sweetheart.”

The beer was cheap, and you could tell, but I wasn’t interested in the way it tasted. I wanted quantity, not quality. “So… Are you really here to drink, or are you babysitting me?”

Dean shrugged. “It can’t be both?”

You have to appreciate his honesty. I laughed and downed half my beer in one go, as he watched me. Then he turned in his seat, taking in the rest of the room.

“Okay, so what are you looking for?” he asked. “What about the blonde accountant type in the corner? Blue collar guys by the pool table?”

I turned around too, holding my beer as I cast an eye around the room. I needed to feel something other than fear and anxiety, and I needed it quickly. So quickly that I was tempted to just drag Dean back to the Impala. I still potentially could, if I struck out with the few guys in the bar.

The two by the pool table didn’t really interest me. One of them was quite tall and broad, which I was into, but there was something about his face that I didn’t like. Not that he was unattractive. It was just his eyes. He definitely saw me appraising him and his friend, and looked back at me. There was a creepy vibe to him, but I couldn’t exactly describe why. His friend was fairly dull-looking and didn’t do anything for me.

The accountant type was more promising. He sat alone, drinking in a booth. He was wearing a suit, but he’d taken the jacket off and had it sitting on the seat beside him. Probably in his mid-thirties, he was clean-shaven, neat and his watch looked a little too pricey for a guy that drank in such a dive. He probably had some interesting back story, if I could be bothered to find out about it. He had his phone held in one hand and was typing or something with the other, and that made it pretty easy to see that he didn’t have a wedding band. He was very focused on whatever he was doing with his phone.

“Accountant’s kinda cute, but he looks busy,” I said. “Seems like a lot of work.”

“He’d look up if you went over there.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, he’s a maybe… Ooh…”

In another booth, close to the bathrooms sat five people, three guys and two girls. It was clear that there were two couples there. They were all young, probably early twenties. One guy and girl sat practically on top of one another, being as public as it was possible to be with their love. The other pair might not have been officially a couple yet, but looking at them, it was clear they didn’t have eyes for anyone else. They sat next to one another, very much leaning in, legs pointed towards each other. She was giggling and touching her hair. He was finding any excuse to touch her.

Beside them was the fifth wheel. It wasn’t that the others were ignoring him. He was engaged in the conversation, to an extent. Without being able to hear what they were saying, I could tell that he was being talked over quite a lot. As I watched, he opened his mouth to say something, but when one of the other guys loudly spoke, he just gave up.

He was cute. Blonde hair, nice face, nervous looking but gentle eyes. Good dress sense, with a pair of dark blue jeans and a brown collared shirt, both fitting him properly. He was maybe twenty-one or two, possibly still in college, but definitely not too young for me. While I was appraising him, he happened to look up and notice me. He blushed and turned back towards his friends.

“That one,” I told Dean, nodding in his direction.

My friend took a moment to look the guy over. “Shit, Ellie. He looks like he’d have to ask his mom first.”

“He’s not that young!”

“He looks… I dunno… Wholesome. Churchy.”

I looked at him again. He was neatly dressed and clean shaven and maybe a little shy, but I didn’t see any reason to make assumptions about his religious habits.

“He looks nice,” I said, as Dean and I both turned back to the bar.

I wasn’t usually interested in nice. In fact, I tended to go for the opposite. Perhaps I was growing as a person, discovering what was really important, as I got older. Also, he was seriously cute.

Putting his beer back down, Dean smirked. “Right. He’ll want you bad, but won’t know what to do about it. Then he’ll go home and do something he’ll have to take to confession later.”

I turned back around to glance at him. He happened to look at me at the same time, and he looked very quickly away again. He wasn’t a good Catholic kid, or he wouldn’t be hanging with the couple who were practically living inside one another’s skin. He was just a somewhat awkward guy.

Dean and I both watched him get up from the table, say something to one of his friends and walk across to stand at the bar. Nice butt… Very nice.

“Bet you I can get him to his car in under five minutes,” I said.

Dean considered this, gesturing to the bartender. His own beer was empty. “What if he doesn’t have a car?”

“Men’s room,” I said.

“Fifty bucks,” Dean agreed, holding up his arm to show me his watch. “Five minutes.”

I stood up, grabbed my beer and downed the rest of the bottle. “You can take it off my share for the motel.” I put the empty bottle back down on the bar in front of him, tugged my shirt down a little and started heading down the other end to where the bartender was handing the guy a beer.

“Hi,” I said, hopping up onto the stool next to him. “How’s it going?”

He gave a blushing, awkward sort of smile that kind of reminded me of Sam. He didn’t have the dimples, though. “I’m okay,” he said. “You having a good night?”

“Terrible,” I told him, with total honesty. “To tell you the truth, I’m kind of looking for a cute dude I’m never gonna see again, so I can have some really amazing sex to take my mind off it.”

He was sipping from his beer as I said this, and he choked as I got to the end. “Um…” he spluttered. “Wow… Uh…”

He finished with an awkward little smile, and I instinctively smiled back, because he was so cute. He had the sweetest little crinkles at the corner of each eye.

“I’m Ellie,” I said. “And just to be clear… you’re a cute dude.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later, I came back into the bar from outside. I’d left George at his car. He needed more time to recover than I did. I found Dean sitting in the same spot at the bar, still with a beer. He had a second one in front of him, which was obviously for me, as he pushed it towards me as I sat down.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Four minutes, twenty-one seconds. What the hell did you say to that kid?”

“I just didn’t waste time with bullshit,” I said. “Why play around pretending like you want to get to know someone when it’s obvious to both of you that you’re just gonna bang and never see each other again?”

Dean shrugged. “That… That’s a good question. What happened to the kid?”

“Getting his breath back. He was sweet. I should go for his type more often.”

He had been somewhat inexperienced and didn’t really know what he was doing, so I’d gotten to be in control a little more than usual. I was very into it, and it was an exciting revelation. Guys who went off to their car with girls like me often tended to have a script they were going by, and you kind of had to fall into it. George had just come out to hang with friends and had not been expecting anything remotely like me to happen. He’d seemed to find the whole thing kind of surreal, like this had to be some kind of a joke and sooner or later the cameras would come out and he’d be interviewed about his reactions. He wasn’t taking the situation, or me, for granted. It was awesome.

Dean smirked, though I couldn’t really tell why. He didn’t say anything. We just sat beside one another and drank our beers for a few minutes. The he turned and said “So… how do we get Sam to do Christmas?”

I sighed. “I… I dunno, Dean. If he has bad memories about it, maybe it’s better to…”

“No. We gotta do it,” he insisted. “You should ask him. He’ll do it for you.”

I shook my head. “Uh… I don’t… Um…” Fuck it. “I don’t like Christmas either.”

Dean’s eyes widened as he looked at me. It was like he was waiting, maybe for me to smile or laugh, and reveal that I was kidding. But I didn’t.

Finally, he responded. “ _You_  don’t like Christmas?”

“Hate it,” I said.

“But…” He was still holding his beer in his hand and gestured towards me with it, but he wasn’t drinking. “Seriously? You?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“I just… I figured you for a Christmas person. You know, family and friends, love and joy, all that stuff. Sparkly lights. It just seems like something you’d be into.”

I guess when you put it like that, it was theoretically my sort of thing. I was a sucker for love and friendship and family and togetherness and all that hokey crap. Plus I loved shiny lights and sparkles.

“You’ve been to my dad’s place in December,” I told him. “You ever see a Christmas tree?”

He thought about this for a moment. “Huh!” It was a little exclamation of surprise.

“Remember how we used to send you birthday cards, if you were in one place for long enough?” I went on.

Dean smiled at this. “You used to draw those little pictures. Cute.”

“We ever send you a Christmas card?”

Dean now put his beer down on the bar and turned to face me completely, his entire worldview apparently shattered in mere moments. I wasn’t who he thought I was.

“Holy shit. You and Bobby don’t do Christmas.”

“Nope.”

“You Jewish and I didn’t notice?”

I smiled. “Nope. We just hate Christmas.”

At this point, it didn’t seem like I was going to get away without explaining myself. I downed the rest of my beer, and gestured to the bartender for another one. I could just vague it out, avoid the details, maybe. But I was in a good place, I’d had a couple of beers and some extremely good sex and I was buzzed enough that the thought of telling everything didn’t make me feel physically ill.

Dean watched as I was handed another beer, and before I could get to my pocket, he forked over the cash for me. Then he watched me take a big gulp. He was a smart guy, and he drank away his problems. He knew exactly what was happening.

“So… you drunk enough to tell me why?”

* * *

It took another beer and a half. I had tried, at several points, to just open my mouth and come out with it. There were multiple ways of phrasing it.  _My mother died on Christmas Day_. That’d be nice and to the point, oughta make it perfectly clear. But when I tried to say it, I just choked on the words.  _I’ve got bad memories of Christmas, real bad._  That wouldn’t come out either. _Something awful happened to us one year_. I got as far as the first two words on that one, before quickly diving back for more beer.

Dean put up with all this, sitting quietly beside me and doing his on drinking. Occasionally, we’d talk about something else: Was Sam having any luck with the case? Was it always this cold here? Didn’t George look awkward coming back in to sit back with his friends?

Finally, midway through my fourth beer, it just came out.

“So… So… November 2nd, that’s a bad day, right?”

I knew from Sam that this was the date their mother had died. He was exactly six months old. Dean looked angry for a second, but then when he looked at me, he must have seen something in my face or my eyes, because he just nodded.

“So… Um… Imagine if every November 2nd, every single year, everyone talked about family and togetherness and love and how important it all is. What if every year they talked about how November 2nd is the best day of the whole year? Everyone. Every year. And they spend more than a month before it, building up to the whole thing and talking about it, and singing songs about it and celebrating what a great fucking thing it is to have your family and people who love you and can you imagine that Dean? Can you just freakin’ imagine how that would feel if the worst day of your whole entire life was celebrated every single year and you had to listen over and over to everyone telling you just how damn great it is? Do you even… Can you just…”

I lost control of my breathing all together, and I could feel the tears in the corners of my eyes. I shut my eyes tight and started to just focus on breathing like I’d always been taught. In through the nose, out through the mouth, calm and clear and safe. In… Out… In… Out… You’re safe. You’re safe… In… Out…

Finally, I was able to open my eyes again, and wipe away the few salty tears that had formed. Not many, just enough to blur my vision a little, before I rubbed my eyes and picked my beer back up.

“How old were you?” Dean asked.

“Nearly three and a half.”

“I was almost five,” he said.

There was at least a minute of total silence between us. I could hear the two blue collar guys talking loudly, not arguing, but passionate about something. One of George’s female friends giggled loudly, and she had a bright, pleasant laugh. The bartender pulled a bottle off the bar, and did something that clinked glass against glass. A motorbike engine revved outside.

Finally, I put down my beer. “You remember much?”

“Heat and flames,” Dean said. “And my dad, giving me Sam and telling me to run. I remember being scared.”

Four years old and in charge of getting a baby safely out of a fire. Damn, that’s some responsibility. Maybe that was why he was so protective of Sam as an adult.

“You?”

I looked up at him. “Huh?”

“What do you remember?”

I’d evidently had enough beer that my mouth was answering for me, without my brain having any involvement in the process. I had never told anybody this before. Not even Sam. And here I was, just blabbing to Dean who, though I liked him, was hardly someone I had an emotional intimacy with.

“Dad thinks I don’t remember it,” I said. “He thinks I only know what he told me. I’m a liar. Been a liar my whole damn life. I remember everything.”

“How did…” Dean took another drink to help him think as he hesitated. “Was it, you know,  _our kind of thing_.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Demon.”

“Ha.” He let out his humourless, bark of a laugh. “Looks like we got more in common than we thought, Princess.”

“Dean… you may not have noticed because I have boobs. But we have everything in common. Cars. Hard rock. Drinking and screwing away our problems.”

“Pie,” he agreed, thoughtfully, with a nod of his head. “And Hunting. I mean… you get it.”

I did get it, now. We both hunted for the same reason. Because there’s shit out there that destroys people. And since we were both destroyed already, why the hell not throw ourselves in front of it? But maybe neither of us was drunk enough to talk about that yet.

“Plus, we’d both do anything for Sam,” I said.

Dean chuckled and gestured to the bartender. “Two whiskeys,” he called out.

Having no other customers, the bartender poured us out two glasses, and slipped the bottle back under the bar right near us. He left it handy, because he was obviously experienced and he knew what two people planning to get completely loaded looked like.

“Aren’t you driving?” I asked.

“We’ll call Sam.” He picked up his glass and took a sip, with all the casual confidence of a guy used to throwing the stuff down. “Speaking of which… And I’m not teasing you… You in love with my brother?”

I took a sip of my own. Not bad. Not the expensive, good quality stuff, but not the cheap stuff that burned so bad you couldn’t taste it either. Then I shook my head. “Nah. I wish I was that smart. But he’s so nice to me, and historically, I don’t tend to fall for guys who treat me like a person.”

Dean appeared to consider this as he took another sip of his whiskey.

“I’d ride him like a freakin’ mechanical bull, though…” I added, as an afterthought.

Beside me, Dean spluttered and spat out a small amount of whiskey. I had to thump him on the back to help him breathe properly again. “Jesus Christ, don’t say that shit! Ever!” He shuddered. “Ugh… I need to bleach my freakin’ ears.”

“Jealous?” I asked, with a smirk. I had told him the truth. I really wasn’t romantically interested in Sam. But… he shouldn’t have pried.

Now Dean smirked. “Please. We both know you want me.”

We did. What was the point of pretending otherwise? We were mature, if slightly tipsy, adults. I just shrugged and took another sip of my whiskey.

“So, how come Bobby doesn’t know?” he asked. I was confused for a moment, because we’d just been talking about Sam. But then I realised he meant about my memories and what I knew about the day my mom died.

“Um… Well at first, I didn’t say anything, cos I didn’t think he’d believe me. I didn’t know what he’d seen, you know? And I already had to see the kid shrinks because I was scared of Santa and Christmas and all that stuff. I thought they’d think I was crazy and take me away. When I was eight he sat me down and told me the truth about what really happened and how mom’s death wasn’t really a robbery gone bad but we had to keep it a secret. And I acted all surprised.”

“Why didn’t you just tell him then?”

I shrugged. “I guess… He said how glad he was I didn’t remember. So… I didn’t want to tell him I did. He had enough problems, you know? I didn’t want him to worry about me.”

“Wow,” said Dean. “You’ve been taking care of Bobby since you were eight?”

“I dunno if I’d call it that,” I said, looking at my near-empty glass. “Man, we are gonna need more whiskey.”

* * *

It was just after two am when Sam arrived, via taxi, to pick us up. Leaning against the Impala, we watched him get out of the cab and then lean back in to pay the driver.

“Your brother’s got a hell of an ass…” I slurred.

“Not listening,” Dean said, determined.

Sam walked across the street to us and easily managed to catch the keys as he moved, despite Dean throwing them with appalling inaccuracy. As he started to unlock the car (a feat Dean had previously attempted and failed at), I came up behind him.

“Sam… Sam… Sam… Sam…”

Having unlocked the door, he turned around. “Yeah?”

“You’re so good… you’re so nice, Sam. Picking us up like this.” I threw my hands around his torso and slammed myself into him, the closest approximation to a hug that I could manage. “Iluffu,” I muttered into his chest.

“What?”

I got my face out of his shirt. Ooh, he did smell good. “I love you.”

“Thanks, Pea,” he said.

He managed to shake me off so he could get into the car and unlock the passenger door for Dean. Then he reached back to open a door for me and I almost fell into the back seat. As I righted myself, I heard him talking to Dean.

“What happened to not getting drunk during a case?”

“She’s a bad influence, Sammy. She’s trouble.”

“You a liar. You got the whiskey!” I called.

Sam sounded amused. I could hear the smile in his voice. He probably had dimples. I would lick the hell outta those dimples… “Hey, it’s great you two are getting along. You’re drinking buddies now, huh?”

“She gets me, Sam.”

“Yeah! I get him! And he gets me!”

“We get each other now!”

“Yeah!”

Sam chuckled as he started the engine. “You get each other hammered…”


	55. Chapter 54: Pressure Cooker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a day spent working on this Evil Santa case. While hungover. But Ellie’s fine. She’s fine. Totally. Just fine.

The good news was that I fell into drunken a coma and didn’t have any nightmares. The bad news was that Sam woke me at eight o’clock the next morning. Only five hours after I’d gone to sleep. He had the usual offering of coffee, which was probably for the best, as otherwise I might actually have killed him. If I’d had the ability to move without my brain pounding.

“Sorry, Pea.” There was a slight smile on his face. I could see those dimples, trying to hide, but just peeping out at me. Mocking my pain. “If it helps, I think Dean may have passed out in the shower…”

All I could think as I remembered how to use my lips and sip my coffee was that Dean was lucky and that maybe if I was very good, I’d get to pass out too. I glared at Sam through a nightmare of matted broom hair while he explained that another mysterious abduction had come up on the police scanner. And this time, the kid had seen his father being taken. By Santa.

“Shut up,” I said.

Sam shrugged. “Sorry. That’s… that’s what the kid said.”

I sighed. “Fine. But get Dean outta the shower. I need to run my head under the cold tap for like fifteen minutes.” I groaned, and pushed my hair back, but it just plopped forward again, trying to cover my eyes.

The dimples burst forth, daring to appear on either side of Sam’s amused smile. Didn’t he know I was suffering?

“What?”

“Your hair is amazing right now. It’s trying to swallow your entire head.”

“Shut up!”

I could hear him chuckling at me as he wandered away to the bathroom door. I winced as he pounded on it. “Dean!” _No… don’t shout. Only whispers._ “Dean! Are you dead?”

There were a series of moans and groans from the other side of the door that certainly sounded like Dean’s voice. I didn’t know if Sam understood them, but to me there didn’t seem to be any words. He sounded like I felt. It was not going to be an enjoyable morning.

 

* * *

 

 

Mrs Caldwell was maybe mid-thirties, with hair that looked as frustrating as mine. She had a nasty black eye and seemed very tired. She explained that her son was upstairs in bed and she’d finally got him to sleep. The poor kid had already been interviewed by the cops and she really hoped we didn’t need to ask him anything else.

“Of course not, Ma’am. We can always come again if there’s anything more we need.” Dean had his best sympathetic face on, and it was a good effort, considering his hangover.

A newfound advantage of my “FBI Consultant” pretext was not having to actually interact or say anything if I was hungover. Or possibly still drunk. I wasn’t sure. I just stood off to the side, having a staring match with the cat, a big fat white Persian thing that seemed very upset with me.

It sat on the back of the sofa, glaring at me out of its weird ugly squashed face. I was pretty sure it was glaring, anyway. I glared back, just in case, as Sam kept talking to Mrs Caldwell.

“We know you’ve been through a lot, but we need to hear what happened in your own words. The local police often leave things out of the report, you know?”

“Sure, I mean… if it helps. It’s just… it’s all so awful, and it’s Christmas!”

Yeah. Tell me about it.

Rather than thinking about awful things happening at Christmas, I kept giving my fat fluffy nemesis the eye. It just kept sitting there, flicking its tail back and forth. Stupid cat. Why couldn’t it be a dog? Dogs love me!

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Mrs Caldwell was saying. “But he seems so certain about it. _Santa took Daddy up the chimney_.”

“So, that’s how your son described the attack?” asked Dean, standing understandably incredulous. “ _Santa took Daddy up the chimney_?”

“That’s what he says, yes.” The poor woman sounded so flat and exhausted. Kinda like I felt, but with a much better excuse.

“And where were you?” asked Dean. He was doing so well to ask the relevant questions and hide his hangover. I was getting a splitting headache just from having my eyes open, despite being full of pharmaceutical aids.

“I was asleep and all of a sudden, I was being dragged out of bed screaming.”

The cat was still staring at me, I pulled a face at it, and turned my back, focusing instead on a wreath above the fireplace. It was pretty, made with some kind of real leaves and with gold and white decorations. It had a rustic kind of quality to it, but not real rustic, like my house. More like designer rustic. But that made it pretty, so it appealed on two levels. I’d probably have liked it if it wasn’t a Christmas ornament. Dean was right. On paper, Christmas was definitely my kind of thing.

“Did you see the attacker?” asked Sam, as I gazed up at the wreath. I liked the big gold bow. Bows are cool. I’d seen some nice dresses with giant bows on when I’d been shopping for fancy outfits in Atlantic City. But I hadn’t been able to buy any of them, because they wouldn’t travel so well. Shame. I’d have looked pretty in a dress with a bow the size of my head.

Wow… my head was really not in the game.

“It was dark and he hit me,” said our victim. “He knocked me out.”

“I’m sorry, I know this is hard.” How did Dean manage to sound so sympathetic? Wasn’t his face throbbing? Mine was.

“Yeah… um, Mrs Caldwell?” Sam sounded nervous. “Where… where did you get that wreath above the fireplace?”

I turned away from the wreath to look over at him. What the hell kind of question was that? Sam would never ask an irrelevant, callous question of a victim. There had to be some reason he wanted to know. Something to do with the case. I looked at it again, confused. I sure couldn’t see what relevance it had. But then, I wasn’t as smart as Sam.

“Excuse me?” asked Mrs Caldwell, more confused than offended.

Sam shrugged and gave his embarrassed smile. “Just curious, you know.”

Even Sam’s cute awkward face was not enough to get an answer though. We were all ushered out of the house and into the horrifying bright light outside. It was the middle of winter, surely it couldn’t really be that bright out.

“Wreaths, huh?” asked Dean, as we headed down the path to the car. “Sure you didn’t want to ask about her shoes? I saw some nice handbags in the… Oompf!”

I was not in a mood to listen to Dean’s casual homophobia, and had reached out and smacked my hand straight into his stomach.

“Shut up, Dean. Tell us about the wreath, Sam.”

“Our first victim had the same one. On the front door.”

I vaguely recalled the interview with Mrs Walsh and her daughter. They did have a wreath on their front door, but I’d been more engaged with what I was doing the previous morning, and hadn’t paid much attention to it. But if Sam thought it was the same one, I believed him.

“Wow. How do you even notice that?”

He smiled. “Cos I’m not hungover?”

“Harsh but fair,” I admitted. “Dean stop pouting, I barely even touched you.”

“I don’t pout,” he said, unlocking the Impala.

 

* * *

 

 

Dad answered on the third ring. He must have been in the kitchen.

“Hi Daddy,” I tried for cheerful, but I’m sure it didn’t come out right. I had been lying on my bedroll with a pillow over my face until Dean had told me to suck it up and help.

“Hey sweetheart, you okay? You sound weird.”

“Not gonna lie to you. I might be kinda hungover.”

Dean scoffed from behind the book he was reading. “Kinda?”

“Shut up,” I called back. “Anyway, um… weird question… is the anti-Claus a thing? Like… evil Santa?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“You still drunk?”

“No! But, we got two guys disappearing up the chimney. And a kid who actually saw Santa drag his daddy up. In a sack. And Sam and I found this stuff about Krampus and some other evil Santa lore and we thought that maybe…”

Dad sighed. “Bunch o’ idjits. No, Ellie! There ain’t an evil Santa dragging people up chimneys.”

“Well, there’s lore says there is… How can you be sure?”

I could actually hear the sound of him frowning. “I’ve done a lot of looking into the rituals and lore about Christmas…”

Oh. Of course he had. I’d even helped him from time to time. We’d never been able to find anything out. Maybe it would have helped if we’d each been straight with the other about what we knew, but we both preferred to just lie for twenty years.

“Yeah,” I said. “Um… so there’s these wreath things. Hang on, I’ll put Sam on.”

I gave the phone to Sam, and as he began to describe the plant used on the two wreaths to my father, I forced myself to stand up. I tried to look over Dean’s shoulder at his book, but ended up sitting beside him instead.

“ _Properties and Uses of Plants and Fungi_ , huh? Isn’t research the funnest?”

He shoved the book onto my lap. “Yeah, I know you love it. Enjoy, Princess.”

I definitely had that coming. I tried to focus on the words as I listened vaguely to Sam talking to my father. I had been staring at the wreath for about thirty seconds, so I might recognise the leaves if I saw them in a picture. Every left hand page was filled with beautiful and accurate-looking coloured drawings of the plants described on the adjacent page. Maybe if I flicked through I would luck out and find it.

Flicking absently through the pages, none of the drawings looked familiar, but it was a big book. I hadn’t even made it through the As, when Sam nudged me and handed me back my cellphone. As I put it to my ear, he hurried over to the table where he’d left his laptop.

“Did you know what it was?” I asked. “Sam looks happy.”

“Yeah, I think he’s got it worked out,” Dad said. “How you doin’ anyway? And I don’t mean your hangover.”

I looked around. Sam was busy reading off his screen, and Dean was in the bathroom, but I’d already come sort of clean with him anyway. I’d told him I hated Christmas at least, and the short version as to why.

“It’s hard, Dad.” I wasn’t whispering, exactly, but I kept my voice pretty low.

He sighed. “Nightmares again?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. I’d never been specific with him as to the nature of my nightmares. Just told him that I had them. I kind of expected a few round about December, but it had never been this bad before.

“Ellie, I know you hate me telling you how to live your life, but… Would you just consider telling Sam and Dean about it?”

That was not what I had been expecting at all. I thought he’d say I should come home. My mind had already been a few steps ahead trying to think of a response to that.

“Oh… Um… Actually I did sorta tell Dean. Some of it. A little.”

“You did? That’s great, kiddo.” He sounded so pleased, like I’d shown him I got an A at school. “I mean… You ain’t ever told anyone before.”

I looked back over at Sam, and he still seemed glued to his screen. “Not much. Just… you know, that mom died.”

Sam was either still using his psychic abilities, or he had been listening, because he looked up after I said that. I quickly looked away so I wouldn’t have to catch his eye and see his pity face. He didn’t even remember his mom, which was its own kind of sad. But I remembered him asking about mine when we were kids, and me telling him never to ask again.

“You tell him how?”

What had I told Dean? Just that it was a demon, as far as I could remember. “Not really.”

“Well, I’m proud of ya. Maybe you should think about telling him everything. Or Sam, if that’s easier.”

I shook my head, though of course, he couldn’t see that. “I… I don’t think I can.”

“Please just think about it,” Dad said. “Just think about telling them what happened and what you remember.”

“I don’t remember…”

“Sweetheart,” he said, and it came out not stern exactly, but firm and decisive. “I ain’t ever pushed it, cos I figured you knew better than me what helped you. But you said you been having nightmares every night. Don’t you think… maybe this year, the old _I don’t remember_ line ain’t gonna help?”

What?

_What?_

What did he mean by “the old _I don’t remember_ line”? Did that mean he knew? Did Dad really know that I remembered? Did he know how much I remembered? Had I been lying to him for twenty years for no reason?

“Dad, I’m not… I’m sorry, I thought you…”

“I ain’t mad, Ellie. I just want you to get some sleep. And not talking about it hasn’t helped that much all these years, has it? Maybe you should try talking about it?”

He kind of had a point. Since four years old I’d been insisting I didn’t remember. I’d clammed up around shrinks and teachers and friends and even my Dad, who was guaranteed to believe me. Yet every year, I still got the same sense of Christmas dread and the same sick feeling every time it snowed. Not talking about what I remembered was supposed to make the whole thing go away, but it didn’t.

“Um… I don’t know. Maybe? I’ll… um… I’ll think about it.”

“Okay. I love you, sweetheart. I’ll keep looking into this pagan thing.”

“Thanks, Daddy. I love you too.”

I hung up and there was a moment of weirdness. I looked back up to see that Sam was still looking at me, but he quickly looked away as soon as I did.

“Sam?”

He looked back at me again. “Uh… sorry. Uh…”

“It’s okay,” I told him. After all, I’d chosen not to leave the room, so it wasn’t his fault he’d heard me talking.

He just stared at me for a moment, and I had no idea what his expression was. It wasn’t pity and it wasn’t embarrassment. There was none of the faint little blush he sometimes got, and no dimples, and no concern wrinkle above his nose. He was just staring at me, and I didn’t know what to do, so I talked.

“Um…”

But he stared to talk at the same time. “Ellie, uh…”

“Is it just me or did it get awkward in here?” asked Dean, apparently just emerged from the bathroom.

I was so relieved, I laughed loudly, and Sam smiled, his dimples finally appearing. “So, Bobby says the wreaths are probably meadowsweet,” he said.

I picked the book back up and flipped through it to find the description and the picture. I looked at it and it did seem pretty familiar. Reading the actual description seemed a little too much work for me, so I passed it behind me to Dean. He glanced at the page, before handing the book to his brother.

“Yeah… this looks like it. It’s pretty rare and probably the most powerful plant in pagan lore.”

“It’s pretty,” I said, offering the most helpful contribution I could in my condition.

Dean had taken the book back. “Says here they used to use it in human sacrifice.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Bobby says it’s kind of like… Chum for gods. They were drawn to it and they’d stop by and snack on the nearest human.”

“Why would somebody be using that for Christmas wreaths?” Dean asked.

“Maybe cos Christmas is a pagan thing?” I asked. “That whole midwinter connection.”

Dean put the book down on the table, looking at me like I was nuts. “Christmas is Jesus’ birthday.”

“Nuh uh,” I told him. “It started out as a festival for the winter solstice. It was really important to a lot of pagan cultures. Then the Christian church adopted it and called it Christmas. They used to do that all the time with pagan gods and traditions, to make Christianity relevant and less scary to local people. But the whole Christmas thing is very pagan. The tree, the yule log, and even Santa’s bright red suit. Totally pagan.”

I might as well have told Dean there was no Santa at all. “What? How do you know all that?”

Because my dad and I spent years researching the winter solstice and pagan rituals. And human sacrifices. We’d never found the answers we wanted, but I’d learned a whole lot along the way.

“Just picked it up,” I said.

“What are you gonna tell me next? Easter bunny’s Jewish?”

I had no idea. Maybe. I’d never done much research into Easter-related rituals. “I dunno. She might be.”

“Easter bunny’s a dude,” said Dean.

I shook my head. “No way. She’s a symbol of renewal and birth and babies. She’s a girl bunny.”

Sam could clearly sense the argument to come, and he skilfully steered us back on course. “So… Looks like we’re dealing with Hold Nickar. God of the Winter Solstice.”

Hold Nickar was a name I knew, but Dad had told me long ago that it wasn’t an avenue worth pursuing. He was the God of Winter, but he wasn’t what we were looking for.

“And all these Marta Stewart wannabes, buying the fancy wreaths…” Dean began.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “It’s pretty much like putting a neon sign on your front door saying _Come Kill Us_.”

“Well, that’s awesome,” I said. “How do we kill him?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said, reading from his laptop. Dean was standing and watching, while I hung over the side of the sofa. “Huh… When you sacrifice to Hold Nickar, guess what he gives you in return?”

“Lap dances, hopefully,” said Dean.

“Mild weather,” Sam told him.

I looked out the window. I had noticed that it wasn’t exactly snowy out. But I’d been so happy about it, glad to be away from the stuff. It hadn’t really occurred to me to think of it as odd, but now that Sam mentioned it…

“You’d think there’d be snow,” I said. “In Michigan. In December.”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“So… can we kill it or not?” asked Dean.

“Not yet, but Bobby’s working on it.” Sam sighed. “We got to figure out where they’re selling those wreaths.”

“Do you think whoever’s selling them _knows_?” I asked. “Are they doing this on purpose? Feeding people to this guy?”

“Could be,” Sam said. “Looks like we’re going wreath shopping.”

 

* * *

 

 

After three Christmas stores, I couldn’t take it anymore. We’d gone in each time, and I’d been surrounded by trees and wreaths and little baby Jesus statues. Reindeer, Santa Claus, pugs in a Santa hat! How the fuck is a pug Christmas related? What, you put a hat on it and all of a sudden it’s Christmassy? I didn’t get it.

The giant candy canes, the plastic elves and the fake snow. As if real snow isn’t bad enough, people have to pretend like there’s snow when there isn’t? And they were all playing Christmas carols. It was torturous.

At the fourth store, I stayed in the car. There was no argument from either of the boys. Dean just gave me a nod of understanding, while Sam said to text if I needed him. Maybe he figured it was just my hangover, or maybe it was enough for him to know I was upset without needing to know why. Maybe it was what he’d overheard me saying to my father. Or maybe all three, I didn’t know.

I lay down on the back seat for a while, careful not to put my boots on the leather. So, Dad knew I’d been lying all these years? He couldn’t know exactly how much I remembered about the demon in my mom’s body, and the things that happened that morning. Sometimes I remembered bits I hadn’t before, so even I wasn’t sure how much I knew. But he obviously knew I had been hiding that I knew something. That was typical of my father. If I didn’t raise it, he wouldn’t. If I wanted to talk to him about something, I always did, so there was no point distressing me, even as a little kid, by trying to get me to open up about something I didn’t want to.

But now he thought I should, and I could definitely see his point. Burying it deep down and just getting cranky for the whole of December was not a strategy that had ever really worked, and it was so much worse this year. I was alone and I didn’t have my father or anyone who knew about what had happened. I’d told Dean I didn’t like Christmas, but that was hardly the same thing as letting it all out. Maybe I ought to tell Sam?

He’d told me about that yellow-eyed demon dripping blood into his mouth when he was a baby. That was some weird-ass ritualistic crap, and so he’d definitely get it if I told him what happened when I was three. But then, Sam didn’t remember it. Dean remembered what happened when his mother died, so he’d maybe get where I was coming from too.

I was still thinking about it five minutes later when the guys came back. They each slid into their seats, and as Dean started the engine again, I sat back upright.

“So?”

“So apparently this Madge Carrigan is a real public spirited woman,” said Dean. “She gave her meadowsweet wreaths away for free, let this guy charge money for them.”

“That’s weird,” I said. I’m optimistic about the basic goodness in people, but making wreaths out of an incredibly rare plant and then just giving them away for someone else to profit off? That seemed pretty suspicious. Ain’t nobody that nice.

It was getting late, so we headed straight back to the motel, figuring we’d order pizza again. Without knowing how to kill Hold Nickar, or even if that was definitely who we were dealing with, we had to just get some sleep and see what we could do in the morning. Christmas Eve. Second worst day of the year.

Back in our room, I threw my shoes off and grabbed my blanket, so I could get comfy on the sofa.

“How much do you think a meadowsweet wreath would cost?” asked Dean.

“A couple hundred dollars at least,” Sam answered.

“Yeah… she’s giving them up for free? No way that’s legit,” I said, and they both nodded agreement as they took off their jackets.

Sam sat on the edge of his bed while Dean grabbed his phone, ready to dial for pizza. “Remember that wreath Dad brought home that one year?”

“You mean the one he stole from, like, a liquor store?”

Dean smiled fondly, clearly not picking up that Sam didn’t feel like talking about their father and Christmas. “Yeah, it was a bunch of empty beer cans. That thing was great. I bet if I looked around hard enough, I could probably find one just like it.”

Sam sighed. I grabbed a pillow and shut my eyes. Maybe I’d be lucky and fall asleep again while they had their argument.

“All right,” said Sam. “Dude… what’s going on with you?”

“What?” asked Dean.

“I mean… since when are you Bing Crosby all of a sudden? Why do you want Christmas so bad?”

“Why are you so against it?” asked Dean. “Your childhood memories can’t be that traumatic. Trust me.”

I opened my eyes. Did that mean what it sounded like? Was he referring to me and what he knew about my mom dying on Christmas Day? Cos he didn’t know the half of it.

“No, that has nothing to do with it,” said Sam.

“Then what?”

“I… I mean…” Sam stuttered. “Well it… it’s clearly making Ellie uncomfortable. And I just, I don’t get it. You haven’t talked about Christmas in years.”

“Well yeah,” Dean said. “This is my last year.”

And that was a really compelling argument. If we couldn’t save Dean, and I’d never tell Sam as much, but it was looking increasingly like maybe we wouldn’t… This was his last year. His last Christmas. If he wanted Christmas, however uncomfortable it made me, or Sam, maybe he ought to get it. Or would that be too much like giving up? I’d scolded him before for using his impending death as a way to manipulate Sam and I, but that was for little things, like getting the first shower or stealing fries. That was because it wasn’t fair to take it lightly like that.

But wanting to have Christmas, one more time, that wasn’t taking it lightly. That wasn’t manipulative.

“I know,” Sam sighed. “That’s why I can’t.”

“What do you mean?” Dean asked him.

“I mean I can’t just sit around, drinking eggnog, pretending everything’s okay, when I know next Christmas you’ll be dead. I just can’t.”

_Oh Sam! Oh honey!_ I could actually feel the pain in his voice. My poor Sam, who kept fighting so hard to believe that his brother could be saved. His optimism was driving me to keep looking for answers too. And it was waning. Sam was the most faithful person I had ever met, and I knew he still prayed to God, every single night. But he was losing that faith and it just broke my heart.

I threw off my blanket and Dean watched me skip across the room in my socks to climb onto the bed next to Sam. Dean didn’t handle this kind of situation so well, but I could tell from his face that seeing his brother hurting was hard for him too. Both my boys were suffering and I didn’t know how to help.

“Hey come on, it’s time to order pizza!” I said, trying to smile. “We’ve got plenty of beer and we’re real close to figuring out what’s up in this town. I reckon we can finish this whole thing off tomorrow!”

Dean broke into a smile and looked at his phone, searching for the number for a pizza place. While his attention was there, I grabbed Sam in a hug and kissed him on the cheek. Then I took the opportunity to whisper. “We’ll find a way, Sam. I promise.”

 

* * *

 

 

We ate pizza, we had some beers and we turned on the TV. There was some weird talent show on, and most of it was bad singing and mediocre magic tricks, but there was a guy who juggled knives and that was pretty cool. I sat on the sofa snuggled up under my blanket, while Sam sat next to me so he could steal stuff off my pizza. He’d ordered vegetarian, but every time I wasn’t looking, he’d pull off pieces of my pepperoni. I was awake to his game, but because it made him happy, I let him get away with it.

Dean had pulled up one of the crappy dining chairs so he could watch with us, and he kept teasing me. Every time some godawful singer would warble their way through a Whitney Houston number, he would grin and say that with a little practice, I’d be almost good enough to go on the show myself. Asshole. Infuriatingly correct asshole.

The knife juggling guy got eliminated, which we all agreed was a freakin’ crime. Sam grabbed the remote and tried another channel, but straight up, the first program he flipped to was some soap opera. The mom was dying of cancer or something and they were in the hospital and she was talking to the young daughter about all the things they’d never got to do. It was all _“I’ll never get to see you go to prom, or dance at your wedding and blah blah blah”_. Sappy as, right? Deliberately manipulative, who would get emotional about that stuff?

I just burst into tears. Sam immediately turned the TV off and scooted closer, wrapping around me so I could start sobbing into his shirt. I could feel his hand in my hair, softly stroking as he held me. My chest was physically hurting from crying and I tried, but I just couldn’t stop. I didn’t even know how long I sat there, firmly held in Sam’s tight grip. I tried to focus on him, his hand in my hair, his nice smell, the feel of the fabric where I gripped his shirt in my right hand.

“I don’t know,” I heard him say, and he must have been talking to Dean.

Then I felt a hand on my back, and it can’t have been Sam’s, because I already knew exactly where both his sat, as I’d been taking stock of everything that I could feel, while I tried to breathe.

“Ellie,” said Dean, with a softness I never even knew he was capable of. “Sweetheart… Do you wanna tell us about your Mom?”


	56. Chapter 55: Weight Off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie tells Sam and Dean a story, because talking can’t be worse than not talking, can it?
> 
> TW: I don't normally trigger warn each chapter, but this one contains some very heavy child abuse, so please be aware and be safe.

My Mama had big brown eyes and everyone said mine were just the same. _You’re gonna grow up real pretty like your mama_ , that’s what they all said, and I couldn’t wait. My Mama was always smiling, and her hands were soft and smooth and gentle. The lady holding me by my hair wasn’t my Mama. Her face was like Mama’s and she was wearing Mama’s clothes but I knew it wasn’t her. Her eyes were black all over and her mouth wasn’t smiling. She had it twisted all funny, like my Daddy when he yelled at the TV. Her hands were pulling on my hair and it hurt. Mama didn’t even pull my hair when she brushed it, she was always super careful and she would stop as soon as the brush caught and made me squeak.

“Stop screeching, you little brat! Now, come on and keep your mouth shut.”

It was Mama’s voice, and I didn’t understand how this lady had taken my Mama’s voice and her face but she had and I didn’t like it.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked her.

“I told you to shut your damn mouth,” she growled, wrapping her hand around my arm.

The lady was scary, and I didn’t want to go with her. I felt the big hot tears on my face and I tried not to make any noise so she wouldn’t be mad at me and pull my hair again.

“I want Mama…” I sobbed quietly, as my teeth chattered from the cold snow covering my feet, and the melted sludge now soaking into my thin dress.

My arm was yanked hard upwards and I squealed as she picked me up. I’d been waiting all this time for my Mama to pick me up and carry me, but this wasn’t her. It was a mean lady who’d stolen my Mama’s face and I didn’t want her to touch me. As she gripped hard around my waist, her other hand smacked across my face.

It hurt. I’d never been hit before in my whole life. If I was naughty, I’d get two warnings or else I’d have to go sit on the stairs by myself. I couldn’t remember ever getting past the second warning. After Mama or Daddy told me off the second time, I always said sorry and tried to be good. Even when they wouldn’t give me a cookie, or made me take a bath.

Having the mean lady’s hand slap straight into my face was a shock and it stung. And I had already hurted my head when I fell over. Now the mean lady was holding me tight, squeezing me around the middle and she was squishing me. My daddy was real big and strong and he never squeezed me so tight it hurt, not even if I was being naughty.

But my daddy… I had seen my daddy asleep upstairs and maybe if I screamed real real loud, he would hear me and come make the mean lady put me down.

So I opened my mouth wide as I could and I screamed. I forgot about crying and shrieked louder than I ever had before. Even bath time never made me screech so loud.

But my Mama’s hand, or the mean lady’s, was big and it covered over my whole mouth. I tried to bite it and I kicked too, because kicking always made it harder for my Mama to get me into the bath, so maybe it would make it harder for the mean lady who’d stolen her face and her hands to take me wherever we was going.

Her grip on me tightened so I couldn’t breathe and I felt like I was going to break. But I kept on kicking hard as I could and trying to bite down on her hand. She was carrying me sideways, with my legs kicking hard on one side and my head thrashing on the other, but I could see she was taking me across the yard. There was lots of rusty cars in the yard, and I wasn’t allowed to play near them, even with someone watching. Sometimes my Daddy took me to look at the big ones far away from the house, and those were the ones we was going towards. There was even a big truck back there.

We went round behind the truck, and I was getting so tired. I’d been kicking and biting all the way from the house and she still hadn’t let go. Not even a little. By the time she dropped me down into the cold snow, I couldn’t even kick anymore.

I was all wet from when I fell over the first time, but now I was back lying in the snow again. I couldn’t hardly feel my legs. Everything was so cold. My fingers felt funny, and my head hurt lots.

Then I felt rough hands on each of my arms. They were like the opposite to the lady who stole my Mama’s hands. She had soft hands that pushed and pulled me around real rough, but these new hands was all rough and scrapy but gentle and nice. Was it my Daddy, come to save me? I looked up, but it wasn’t Daddy picking me up out of the snow. It was a strange men I hadn’t never seen before ever.

He picked me up real gentle, just like my Daddy always did, and he put me down on top of one of the old rusty cars. He sat me on the front part, which Daddy said was called the “hood”. I looked up at him, my teeth still chattering.

He had dark hair, and he was definitely a grown-up, but he didn’t look as old as my Daddy. While I looked up at him, he crouched down to my level, so I could look into his face. But he didn’t have the weird black eyes like the lady who wasn’t Mama. He had eyes that looked sorta yellow.

“You upset her,” he said, and he was looking at the mean lady. “You better hope the father doesn’t come running.”

“I want Daddy!” I squeaked.

The man was looking at me now. He had kind of a nice face, but his weird yellowy eyes scared me. He was smiling at me. “Hey now, its okay, sweetheart. Your name’s Ellie, isn’t it?”

His smile was nice and he wasn’t hitting me or pulling my hair. Maybe he was a nice man, and he was gonna punish the mean lady and take me back to my real Mama and my Daddy. I tried to open my mouth to tell him what she’d done to me, but no sound came out. I just nodded my head instead. He knew my name. Maybe he knew my Mama and Daddy.

“Are you sure?” the mean lady asked. “This whiny little brat? Really?”

But the man smiled at me again. He liked me. “It’s not what she is. It’s what she’s going to be. You’re a very special little girl, Ellie.”

That’s what my Mama always said. Maybe he did know her. But I was scared and I was shy, so I just nodded and hoped he would take me somewhere else soon, where it wasn’t so cold and wet. I just wanted Mama, or Daddy. Or even Granny.

“It’s her alright,” said the nice man with the strange eyes. “Give me the vial.”

Everything was starting to look real fuzzy and I could see weird black shapes floating in front of my eyes. I tried to see what the mean lady was giving to the man, but I couldn’t. But I felt his finger on my head, as he traced weird lines over my face. Then he said some weird words. The ground started to move, shaking as he made weird sounds and his voice was funny. Not like a person’s voice at all. Like a dog growling, but coming from his person mouth.

I screamed and this time, sound did come out, but not for very long. Something soft was stuffed inside my mouth so no more sound could come out.

Then there was pain, in my belly. Way more pain than when the mean lady had hit me. Way more pain then when I bumped my head. More pain even than the time Mama accidentally shut the closet door on my fingers. More pain, I’m pretty sure, than I’d ever been in before, and probably since.

Then the fuzzy dark shapes got bigger and darker and I couldn’t see anything at all but black.

 

* * *

 

 

“And then I… Um… I… I… I… I guess… Um… I guess I passed out,” I finished.

I had long since used up all the tissues, and I was now sobbing into a face towel Dean had grabbed out of the bathroom. I had Sam pressed up close to me, hip to hip, as he rubbed his large hand up and down and in circles over my back. Dean, who had started out sitting beside me, had become so aggravated during my story that he was now pacing the carpet, fists clenching and unclenching as he came first towards me, and then turned and stomped away again.

Clutching the damp towel to my face, I let it cover my eyes completely so I didn’t have to look at them. I couldn’t look, not at Sam’s sad eyes and slightly incongruous clicking jaw, or at Dean’s agitated pacing. I’d never seen myself from the outside before, a pitiable victim of something unknown and terrible.

“Those sons of…” Dean muttered. “Who were they? Tell me Bobby got ‘em.”

I shook my head, and felt the ache in my lower back that signalled another torrent of tears. Each one formed at the pit of my stomach and shuddered up my body before coming out in a series of squeaking sounds so pathetic not even Dean had the heart to mock them. By now, Sam had learned to sense them too, and he would move his hand to grip me by the shoulder and pull me closer into him.

I felt his breath in my hair, as he kissed me. “It’s okay,” he said, his voice as soft as his heart. “It’s okay, Sweetpea. Crying’s okay, remember? It takes the weight off.”

I knew he was talking about the time I’d confessed my… attraction to girls (I still had trouble with the B word). Dean still had no idea about that, so rather than say anything else, I just nodded. He was right. Just talking about that, and having a really good cry, had made me feel better. Not fixed, or different or cured, the way I maybe wanted to be. But it felt better.

If crying took the weight off, then I was shedding tonne after tonne. My whole face ached from sobbing, and the face towel was definitely getting wet, never mind the tissues scattered around me.

“So… So… the rest I only know from what Dad and Uncle Rufus said. But that was…” I took another deep breath as I fondled the wet towel in my hands. “That was way later.”

Keeping hold of my towel in one hand, I let the other flop beside me. I seemed to be running dryer. Maybe I’d run out of tears. How much can the body produce in one half hour, anyway?

“Who’s Uncle Rufus?” asked Dean, coming towards me again.

“Um… Um…” I brought the towel up to dab at my eyes again. God I must have looked appalling. “So… Dad did hear me screaming. And… Um… Well, he says when he got there, I was bleeding real heavy and a man was running away. Which I guess was the guy with the weird eyes… I don’t… Dad never saw his face or anything, and… and I never told him what I remember, so… so… I don’t really… anyway…”

I felt another shudder of tears, but very few actually came out this time. I just squeaked into my towel, and tried to breathe properly while focusing on Sam’s arm around me, to ground myself in the present.

“Um… So, Dad was armed, and what he saw was basically a guy running off. And me gagged and bleeding while my mom held me upright. And she had a knife, so… you know… he kinda drew conclusions real quick. In the moment, you know? He warned her twice and she didn’t say nothing, so… um… he… um…”

Another hysterical bout of squeaking and shaking as I tried to force the words out. He shot her. He had to. It wasn’t Dad’s fault. He knew something was off about my mom, but I was gonna die. I might already have been dead, for all he knew, but I was three years old and he had to think quick, in the moment.

Don’t you ever, _ever_ say it was Dad’s fault.

I didn’t need to explain the rest to the boys. They knew what I meant. I didn’t know what they thought about it. Maybe they blamed my dad, maybe they wondered if they’d do the same, shoot the wife to save the kid. Maybe they were just horrified by the whole thing. I didn’t ask. I just moved on to the next part of the story, because by that point, I had to finish. It was too late to stop.

One hand was still on my back, but I felt Sam’s other hand slip over mine, as he wrapped his long fingers around it. He just left it there, softly holding my hand while I went on.

“So, um... Dad didn’t know what possession was… He wasn’t a hunter then… um… obviously. So… um, he didn’t get why shooting her didn’t do anything. So he charged at her, knocked her down and that made her drop me into the snow again. Um… Um… Then Uncle Rufus came. But, he wasn’t Uncle Rufus then. He was just this guy Dad didn’t know. But he yelled, told Dad _I’ll deal with her! Get the girl!_ And so Dad used the gag in my mouth to bandage my stomach a little, you know? And Uncle Rufus says he hit the demon a few times and then exorcized it. But… um… um… umm…”

“But your mom had already taken the bullet,” Dean said.

I nodded, but this time, I didn’t dissolve into more sobbing. “Yeah. She felt everything… Like… Um…”

“Like that girl, Meg?” asked Sam. “You were so upset.”

I nodded. Poor Meg. Seeing that girl suffer had been a horrifying experience for me. At least my Mom was only possessed for a few hours. But she must have suffered so much, feeling her own hands sacrificing her baby to some weird-ass ritual. She was probably glad when Dad shot her. I hadn’t been able to bear thinking about it when I saw Meg exorcized. I’d poured all my feelings out into grieving for my poor dog. It’s awful when thinking about your murdered dog is the only remotely positive place your mind can go.

“Anyway,” I finished. “Mom died. And they took us both into the house. Dad took care of me, while Rufus made it look like there’d been a robbery gone wrong, killed Mom. Dad knew something was wrong about it, and so he listened when Uncle Rufus said he couldn’t take me to the hospital, and he couldn’t tell the cops what really happened. And they called the cops, gave the robbery story, made out like I was still in bed and hadn’t heard anything. Then they sat and waited for me to wake up and Rufus told Dad the truth. That’s how they tell it.”

“So… Bobby wasn’t a hunter?” Sam asked. “I mean… before?”

I shook my head, glad to focus on something that wasn’t my mom dying or my own trauma. “No. Rufus taught him.”

“How come we never heard of this Uncle Rufus before?” asked Dean.

I didn’t really know. “Oh… um… he and Dad had some kind of falling out. Years back. I was maybe 12…”

Sam smiled. “Bobby? No way!”

I threw my towel at him and let out a little laugh, which had to be quickly followed by a big sniff, to stop me crying. “And your Dad was such a people pleaser!” It was amazing our fathers had managed to spend even ten years on speaking terms, given their combined level of stubbornness.

Dean had finally managed to stop pacing, and he came and sat beside me, on the arm of the sofa. He didn’t touch me, or say anything like _I’m sorry this awful thing happened to you_ , but he didn’t need to. I knew that. I could tell because he’d run to fetch me something to cry into, and because he’d kept balling up his fists and because even though I was basically superglued to Sam, he didn’t make one joke about it.

“You tried to bite it, huh? Baby Ellie was kind of a badass.”

I gave a sort of hiccup laugh, and that jump started a few tears, but not many. I wiped them away with my fingers. “She was probably scarier than grown-up Ellie.”

“I dunno,” said Dean. “You can be pretty terrifying.” Sam smiled slightly. “I mean… not that I’m scared of you. But, you know… some people would be.”

“Sure,” I said, so grateful for the chance to smile.

“Uh… Ellie?” asked Sam, looking down at where our hands sat threaded together on his knee. “We don’t have to talk about it if… uh… never mind. It’s not important.”

“I’m okay,” I told him. “I mean… not okay but, you know… okay.

But he just shook his head. “Nah, it doesn’t matter.”

I was sure it did matter. But Sam was not one to ask me an upsetting question if he could avoid it. Maybe I could remember to ask him again someday, when I was a little more together. But for now, it was time to get some sleep. We had to seek out this suspiciously generous Madge Carrigan lady in the morning. It was getting late, and if I was going to be repeatedly woken up by nightmares, I was going to need extra time to sleep.

With a strange reluctance, I extracted my fingers from where they were laced with Sam’s.

“Thanks,” I said, as he shuffled and moved his arms away so I could stand up. “I never told anyone about it before… I dunno, I think it maybe helped a little.”

“I hope so,” Sam said, as I pulled my feet out from under me.

I stood up and grabbed Dean into a hug, pulling him off the sofa. He held me tight, like he really meant it, and I closed my eyes for a second and just let my friend hold me. Then I let him go, but I stood up a little higher, so I could give him a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Thanks, Dean,” I said softly. “I love you.”

The awkward way he shrugged was kind of adorable and kind of sad. He was like my Dad, not good with expressing the softer emotions. I knew it was there. I could feel it in the way he hugged me, but unlike my father, he didn’t have twenty-five years of practice to ease him into it. He wasn’t going to say “I love you too”. And that was okay.

After I let him go, I had a hug and a kiss for Sam, too. “And I also love you,” I said.

And there were those beautiful dimples, popping out to prove that he was sincere when he smiled and said “I love you too, Sweetpea. Wake me up if you need to, okay?”

But you know what’s really weird? I didn’t need to. That night, I didn’t have the nightmare. Not even the first part, headed down the stairs before I saw that demon inside my mom. I didn’t have any good dreams either, or at least, not that I remembered in the morning. But I had a whole night of restful sleep, and when Sam shook me awake with coffee at nine o’clock, I felt incredible.

 

* * *

 

 

We had tracked down Mrs Carrigan to a super ordinary suburban house, with neatly trimmed and edged lawn, carefully maintained garden and a bunch of Christmas decorations. There was a happy looking snowman and a big creepy Santa. They had a wreath on the door and I could see a large Christmas tree through the window. Above the house number was a big sign saying “The Carrigans”.

“This is where Mrs Wreath lives, huh?” asked Dean. “Can’t you just feel the evil pagan vibe?”

You could if you knew as much about the pagan origins of Christmas as I did, but I knew that wasn’t what he meant. It was so normal, so _suburban_.

Reaching through the fake wreath to get to the door knocker, it occurred to me that it was pretty weird Mrs Carrigan would give away wreaths worth upwards of a hundred bucks but have a plastic one on her own front door. I made a mental note to point it out to the boys later. In the meantime, the door was opened.

She was a lady of about the same age as my Dad, all cardigan and pearls. The kind of Grandma I always saw on TV and wished I had. Mom’s father and both Dad’s parents had died before I was born, and my only Granny, Mom’s mom died when I was six. But I always had this mental image of what a granny would be like. She’d have a nice face like this lady, and wear pearls and smile all the time and give me candy.

“Yes?” she said, with a smile.

Dean turned on the charm. “Please tell me you’re the Madge Carrigan who makes the meadowsweet wreaths.”

“Why, yes I am,” she said. Her voice was so friendly and her rosy cheeks so inviting.

“Ha. Bingo!” said Dean, with a broad smile.

“Your wreaths are so pretty,” I said, which wasn’t really a lie. They were nice if you detached them from their purpose.

“Isn’t that meadowsweet just the finest-smelling thing you ever smelled?” she asked, beaming down at me. She practically radiated kindness and I gotta tell you. It was suspicious as hell.

“It is,” Sam said. “It sure is. But the problem is, is that all your wreaths had sold out before we got the chance to buy one.”

“Oh fudge!” said Madge and the way she said it sounded more like she was excited to see fudge than a substitute for a swearword.

“Ellie here was so disappointed,” Dean lied, still exuding Charming Young Man. “And I said to my brother here, _my wife deserves the best_. Didn’t I Sam?”

“You uh… you did,” said Sam, as Dean put an arm around my waist.

“So we were hoping you had another one we could buy from you,” Dean finished.

Madge looked so sorry. “Oh, I’m afraid those were the only ones I had for this season.”

“Oh no!” I said, trying to sound as disappointed as possible.

“That’s such a shame, isn’t it honey?” Dean asked.

“It sure is, cuddle-bear,” I replied, and I could actually feel Sam’s body behind mine, shaking as he tried to hold in laughter. “I just love that meadowsweet. And so unusual! What made you decide to make wreaths out of it?”

“Why the smell, of course!” As she spoke, a man came down the staircase behind her. He was also sporting a cardigan, and was smoking a pipe. An actual pipe! He was my dream Grandpa. “I don’t think I’ve ever smelled anything finer.”

“What’s going on, honey?” asked the man, coming up to stand at her shoulder.

“Well, this nice young man was asking about buying one of my wreaths for his wife. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Oh, the wreaths are fine. Fine wreaths,” Perfect Grandpa said, flashing his spectacularly white teeth. He held out a red container. “Care for some peanut brittle?”

Dean reached out his hand, but I was so suspicious of these two and their all-too delightful appearance that I didn’t trust any food they were offering. I slapped Dean’s hand away. “Sweetie, your blood pressure!”

I could tell Dean was resentful by the way he pulled me closer into him. “Aw, she’s always taking such good care of me!”

“Oh, aren’t you just the sweetest couple?” asked Madge.

“Yeah, they’re the cutest,” Sam said, from behind me. “It’s a real shame you don’t have one of those wreaths, but we better leave you alone. Christmas Eve and all, you must be busy.”

“Well, it’s just such a pleasure to meet you folks,” said the husband. “Hope you find yourselves a real nice wreath.”

“Me too,” I said. My freakin’ face hurt from smiling. “Something real pretty.”

“Not as pretty as you,” Dean said with a smile, and I heard a definite snigger from Sam.

I slapped Dean’s shoulder playfully.  “Oh, you!”

Madge and her husband gave us such delightful, adoring smiles as we turned and made our way back to the car, Dean’s arm still around my waist. We all piled back in, and I noted that they were watching us, rather than close their door straight away and go back about their business.

As Dean started the engine, Sam turned around to look at me. “Cuddle-bear?”

I shrugged. “When I Fake Wife, I Fake Wife hard.”


	57. Chapter 56: So Freakin' Nuts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sam and Dean are captured, Ellie has to figure a way out of the situation. But how reckless does a rescue have to be if even Dean Winchester thinks you’re crazy?

The big creepy Santa in the front yard seemed even bigger, and even creepier, at night. It loomed over the Carrigans’ picture perfect lawn as we crept up their straight garden path.

My dad had called a little while after we got back to the motel. According to him, evergreen stakes ought to take care of our little Pagan Christmas God problem. While Dean was getting some wood, Sam and I had done a little digging on the Carrigans. They had moved to Ypsilanti in January, from Seattle. There’d been two Christmas abductions in Seattle the year before. Sam also assured me that while looking over the top of my head, he had noticed vervain and mint hanging up inside the house. That’s some pretty old school pagan shit for a nice old couple who gave away expensive wreaths and offered visitors peanut brittle.

We didn’t know exactly what Madge and her husband were up to, or how they were connected to Hold Nickar, but breaking into their house in the middle of the night, armed and dangerous, seemed like the way to find out. Dean suggested they were hiding a pagan God under their plastic-wrapped couch.

It was a standard suburban front door and a pretty easy lock to pick. I got us in pretty quick and we headed inside, with the usual formation: Dean first, then me, Sam at the back. We each had a flashlight and Dean had a whole duffle full of the evergreen stakes he and I had sharpened. My pink knife, with its new silver blade, was in my jeans pocket. Be ready for anything, I reckon. Plus, it made me feel more confident, somehow. Maybe because Sam gave it to me, or maybe because it had been there when I really needed it, saving me from vampire blood in the mouth.

Left of the little foyer, there was a decent sized living room. The large Christmas tree was lit up in front of the window. Didn’t they know that’s how house fires start? Dean handed stakes to Sam and I as he examined the couch.

“See… Plastic,” he said, with a disapproving shake of his head.

While Dean took in the rest of the decorations in the living room, Sam and I wandered through the foyer. Sam looked at the array of snowglobes and I moved into the kitchen. After one look at the big table, I went to the door and whispered.

“Sam… Check it out…”

He followed me in, his stake at the ready, and I showed him. The kitchen table was covered in deserts. Cookies and slices and tiny little pies and tarts. Tiny food? Did Christmas have tiny food and no one ever told me? Rude!

“You leave sweets for Santa, right?” I whispered. “Like… a sacrifice?”

“Right,” Sam said, tugging on my sleeve. “Look…”

He pulled me over to a door. From where it was in the kitchen, it looked like it probably went down to a basement. There was a lock and a deadbolt on it. But, you know, some people like to protect their laundry and old broken junk real carefully…

The door wasn’t locked and while Sam went to grab Dean, I tightened my grip on the stake and checked my pocket. My knife was still there, right where I’d left it.

The boys came back in together, and we got into our safe formation. It had taken us a while, but we’d developed a system and it worked.

Each of us shining our flashlights to try and get some idea of what we were dealing with, we crept down one rickety stair at a time. It was so dark, even with all three of us adding some light. I could see vague lumpy shapes.

The first thing I found at the bottom was a large bowl. Filled with bones, red and stained with some of the meat and blood still on them. Not a good start. What were the Carrigans keeping down there? Hold Nickar himself? As I stared at the bones, Sam nudged me, and I followed the beam from his flashlight to see another bone down on the floor. It was a long bone, but I couldn’t tell if it was human. There were bloodstains on the stairs and the ground. Weird carving implements lay on shelves, still wet with the remains of whatever they’d been used on.

There was enough space for us to spread out, and something under the stairs caught my eye. It was white and red, and as I got closer, I realised it was a pile of bones. Just a small collection, loosely thrown together. Maybe once the meat had been eaten off them?

I crouched down to get a closer look, making sure to still keep a firm hold on my stake. But it didn’t seem like there was anyone, or anything, down there. It was clear now that people had been killed there, and recently, but whatever it was had gone. Or so it seemed.

“Sam!”

I heard Dean call out his brother’s name and I turned my head, stake instinctively at the ready. Sam was halfway up the wall, a hand around his neck and lifting him off the ground. It was Madge, still in her pearls and cardigan. How strong was she?

Dean was rushing at her, but before he could even reach her, Mr Carrigan was there. With incredible reflexes, he grabbed Dean and bashed him against the wall, knocking him straight out. If they could overpower Sam and Dean that quick, I didn’t stand a chance. But, had they seen me? I was down low and under the stairs. I could see through the wooden planks, but from head height, they might not have been able to see back through.

Staying crouched and careful not to move the beam of my flashlight and attract their attention, I watched them look around. Sam was still held hard against the wall, but unlike Dean, he was conscious.

Madge turned back to him first. “Gosh, I wish you boys hadn’t come down here.”

“Such a shame,” her husband agreed. “Your young lady friend is going to be up waiting for you.”

“Poor thing, she’ll be sick with worry,” Madge agreed.

Then she slammed his head backward like he was just a ragdoll, and he crumpled straight down to the ground.

I swallowed hard and bit my lip. Mr Carrigan bent down and grabbed Dean by the arms. Madge did the same with Sam and began to pull him towards the stairs. I couldn’t see them anymore, but I could hear them on the planks above me. When I looked up, I could make out the long shapes of Sam and Dean being dragged up. Still trying to stay very still, I was forced to just watch. Thump thump, they were pulled up one step at a time. At least they were carried by their arms, so it was their feet thumping against each plank instead of their heads.

It seemed like ten minutes, but realistically, it was probably more like two. Then the door slammed shut and I was alone in the creepy death basement.

I waited another minute or so, to be absolutely sure neither of the freakishly strong fifties sitcom grandparents was still downstairs. So… not a weird old couple hiding a God in their basement. More likely a pair of actual pagan Gods. Oki doki.

My immediate problem was that they were likely to eat Sam and Dean, unless I could get up there and figure out a way to stop them. I still had my evergreen stake, and now I knew for sure who to use it on. It was likely to be just me against the two of them though, and I didn’t think much of those odds. Madge had lifted Sam a foot off the ground with one hand.

I shone my torch around the basement, trying to ignore the bones and bloodstains. They’d killed three people, and horrific though that was, I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it now. But I could help my boys escape.

There was a small window, up high, but near some shelves. Maybe I could climb up and scramble out. I crawled out from under the stairs to take a closer look. I looked up at it, trying to gauge its width. No. Even if I could get my shoulders through, the danger of me getting stuck was too high. I didn’t want to end up with my head in a flower bed and my legs in the basement, stuck there until the Carrigans finished eating my friends and came for me.

Well… my natural talent lay in stealth. Everyone was always saying so. If they were busy with the boys, maybe I could sneak back up the stairs and into the main house. Once I assessed the situation, I could work it out from there.

I gathered up the stakes the guys had dropped and stuffed them in the waistband of my jeans, one on each hip. I’d have spares if my stake got taken out of my hand somehow, and if not, I could give them back, give Sam and Dean something to fight their way out with. The flashlights and our bag of stakes would just have to stay. We could get them back later. It wasn’t like they’d need them if I couldn’t save them.

Getting up the stairs without making a sound was easy. The trouble was the other side of the door. I didn’t even dare open it, because I could hear them in the kitchen. They were definitely talking to one another, but not loud enough for me to make out more than the odd word. It was impossible to say what they were doing to Sam and Dean, or if the boys had woken up.

I kept my ear to the door, trying to listen. There were a few thuds and bangs, but nothing violent. I wondered if they killed their victims upstairs or in the basement… If they were going to kill them, they’d just have done it right away, wouldn’t they? It obviously wasn’t as simple as that, so we still had time.

Then there was a period of silence. But could I risk opening the door, even just a crack? I was seriously considering it, when I heard Madge’s voice again.

“Ooh, and here we thought you two lazybones were gonna sleep through all the fun stuff!”

If she was talking to Sam and Dean, then they had to be awake, or at least one of them was. The voice that replied was difficult to make out. It sounded like Dean.

Then there was something from Mr Carrigan, I was pretty confident, and the voice that responded to him was for sure Sam.

“Oh now, don’t get all wet!” Mr Carrigan scolded him. His tone didn’t suggest he meant literally wet. It was maybe more of a response to something Sam had said.

There was quite a lot of back and forth after that. I heard all four voices, I thought, though Madge and Dean were the easiest to make out clearly. Dean said something about cunning ham? That was the point when I realised trying to actually understand anything was fairly pointless. Unless they raised their voice, it was just a jumble through the thick door.

The next thing I heard clearly was Dean, shouting out “Sammy?! Sammy!”

“D…Don’t!” said Sam, and then he screamed loudly.

What was happening? Jesus, they were eating Sam!

“Leave him alone, you son of a bitch!” Dean demanded.

I was ready to rip the door right open, but what good would running out there do? I needed to think. I sat huddled against the door, my ear pushed right up against it. I could hear my own panicked breathing and my fast heartbeat better than I could hear what they were saying or doing.

How much advantage would surprise give me? If I flung the door open and ran out there while they were trying to kill Sam, maybe I would have the jump on them enough to distract them. Then Dean could get free and help me? Either of the guys definitely knew how to break out of most kinds of bindings. They could pick handcuffs and slip ropes. They just needed enough time.

“You bitch!” screamed Dean, and I prayed it wasn’t because Sam was lying dead.

But after a few more mutterings from the Carrigans, I heard Sam’s voice again, and he sounded okay. “What do you think you’re doing with those?” His voice was fearful and angry, but it was clear and strong. He definitely wasn’t dying.

“You fudgin’ touch me again and I’ll fudgin’ kill you!” hollered Dean.

Fudging? What the hell was going on out there?

Another scream from Sam and my hand started reaching for the door handle. Screw it. I was going out there, before they killed one or both of my friends.

As I stood up, the movement shifted my jeans and I felt something digging at my leg. At first I thought it was the stake I’d shoved in that side, but it was lower. It was my cellphone.

Oh!

A plan started to formulate in my mind. It was a stupid freakin’ plan. Possibly the stupidest thing I had ever thought of, except for running out there to take on two pagan Gods on my own. This was only mildly less dumb than that.

I crept back down the stairs, trying to ignore the sound of Dean crying out. Quick as I could, I scurried to the shelves under the window, and climbed up to unlock it and push it open.

Then I ducked back under the stairs and got down low. I turned off my flashlight, and grabbed the cellphone out of my pocket. Sam was at the top of my speed dial.

Shaking with fear and the knowledge that this was the most reckless diversion in history, I held the phone up to my ear and listened to it ringing. It was finally answered.

“Hello there,” said Madge, sweet and pleasant as you like. “I’m afraid Sam is a little tied up right now.”

“I figured,” I said.

I could hear what sounded like Dean groaning.

“Why, you’re that nice young lady who came with the boys earlier, aren’t you?”

“That’s me. I suppose you’ve got them hostage now?”

“Oh my word, no!” Madge said. “We don’t take hostages. We’re going to eat them, dear. We don’t like to take too many sacrifices a year, but fair’s fair, they came to us.”

I shrugged. From their point of view, I guess that was pretty reasonable.

“Put it on the speaker thing, honey,” said Mr Carrigan, from nearby.

“How do I do that? Is it this button?”

“No, the… yes, that one.”

“Well, your friends can hear you now, dear,” said Madge, with that slightly muddy speakerphone sound. “Would you like to say anything before we start the ritual?”

“It’s okay, guys,” I said. “I got this. You’ll be okay.”

“You know, you could come be backup anytime!” shouted Dean. “Don’t hold back.”

“Big words from a guy who got caught,” I said. “What, you couldn’t hide like I did? Now, just hold on while I get my ass through this window, and I’ll come get you.”

“Oh, language!” said Madge.

“Through the… She’s still in the basement!” Mr Carrigan hollered, and I could hear him through the door above me, as well as the phone.

Wow! Sucker. Like I’d reveal I was in the basement unless it was on purpose! How dumb did they think I was?

As I hung up, I heard the basement door open and the panicked sound of two pairs of feet on the stairs above me. Both the Carrigans thundered over my head. This was kind of as far as I’d thought it through. Sam and Dean definitely had the sense to try and bust out, but how long would it take?

All I could do was keep a couple of Gods distracted long enough for two people to escape, arm themselves and arrive to be

backup.

Hitting the bottom of the stairs, the Carrigans looked around, and the first thing they looked at was the window. Since I’d clearly climbed up there to open it, they reacted as I thought they had, and assumed I’d gone through. They’d only seen me once, fairly briefly and I wasn’t sure myself whether I could get through that window, so there was no way they’d be able to judge.

“She wasn’t stuck,” Madge scolded her husband. “It’s a distraction, she’s already outside. Go find her.”

Mr Carrigan had wised up pretty quick. “Unless she’s still here…”

Okay… time to take a stupid diversion and ramp it up to straight up kamikaze. With their backs still turned, I took three silent steps out from under the stairs, made sure I had a good grip on my stake and was ready to run.

“Behind you!” I called, as I started dashing towards the stairs, and up.

They followed me right away, but they were at a standing start, and by the time I heard them on the steps behind me, I was already through the door. But they were gaining so fast, I didn’t even have time to shut the door after me.

I burst into the kitchen, and past Sam and Dean, who I just had time to glimpse were back to back on a pair of dining chairs.

“You’re so freakin’ nuts!” yelled Dean.

“Hurry the hell up!” I called, as I kept running out and through into the foyer.

I tipped the dresser full of snowglobes over as I ran. Hopefully the damn things would be totally destroyed, never to torment anyone with their offensively cutesy Christmas scenes ever again.

Getting to another staircase, I figured the best thing to do was go up. I could hear two pairs of footsteps behind me and they didn’t sound far away. I tried to pick up the pace, but there was nowhere to go, and before I’d made it two steps onto the landing, I felt a vice grip on my arm.

Why couldn’t I be a faster runner? I could have gotten out of the basement quick enough to lock them down there. Instead, I was being dragged backwards and, oh God, not again… I threw my hands up to protect my head, but I went slam into the wall anyway and then there was black.

* * *

I woke up on the plastic covered couch. My first instinct was to check for ropes and bindings, but as soon as I had my bearings, I realised Dean was sitting next to me.

“Dean!”

“So freakin’ nuts,” he muttered, and I could see him struggling not to smile.

“You’re welcome. What happened?”

“Turns out a Christmas Tree is just a big evergreen stake,” said Dean. “You were only out a couple minutes. Sam’s getting our stuff from the basement.”

I felt the back of my head, but there didn’t seem to be any blood or anything. Apparently, my head injury from earlier in the year had healed up, but I didn’t think yet another blow would be very good for me.

“Yeah… It looks okay, but how do you feel? How’s your vision? You got a headache?”

“I… I don’t feel great,” I admitted, because being stoic and tough is one thing, but you don’t mess around with head wounds. “But I can see okay and everything.”

Dean nodded, and I saw him looking over my head. “Come on, up you get, Princess. Can’t lie around all night.”

He spoke like a drill sergeant, but he gave himself away as he leaned forward and took both my hands. He gently helped me onto my feet and as I adjusted, he kept a hand hovering at the small of my back.

I had black floaters in front of my eyes, but that can happen when you stand up, and didn’t necessarily mean concussion. I seemed to be thinking clearly, and Dean hadn’t mentioned seeing anything wrong in my eyes.

“I think I’m fine,” I said, taking an experimental step forward.

Dean stayed close to me as I headed across the room towards the foyer. Sam met us there, the dufflebag of torches and stakes slung across his back. He held a hand out towards me as I got closer, but I shook my head.

“I can walk. It’s okay. Come on, we gotta get out of here before the cops come.”

Dean smirked. “Love to know what they think of this mess.”

They’d stabbed an elderly couple with a Christmas Tree. That was certainly going to raise some questions for the local authorities. Kind of hard to explain that one, and they’d still have the three chimney abductions.

But explaining was not our job. We just hunted the things. How the mess got sorted out was none of our business, as long as no one could link it back to us.

Sam stayed pretty close to me as we rushed back to the car. Me and the dufflebag were bundled into the back as quick as possible, and the guys got in too so we could make a clean getaway. It was unlikely any of the neighbours had seen us, or the car. It was 2am on Christmas morning. There wasn’t anyone around, unless you believed in Santa Claus, and he was hardly going to help the police with their enquiries.

Back at the motel, I had to sit still and be good through a complete health check-up. Sam shone a flashlight at me, carefully battled with my hair to thoroughly examine the back of my head and made me answer easy questions. I passed everything, but I was exhausted by the time he was done, and I didn’t even bother to shower before I collapsed onto my bedroll.

It was Christmas Day, and if I was real real lucky, maybe I’d sleep all the way through it.


	58. Chapter 57: Just This Once

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can’t just get over a trauma like Ellie’s but if your friend has five months to live and he’d really like to celebrate Christmas, maybe you could take deep breaths and give it a try, Just This Once.

I got to wake up of my own accord. Not being woken by Sam meant I didn’t get coffee, but I didn’t need the coffee, because I’d slept until my body woke up naturally. At eleven-thirty! Such decadence!

Lying on the ground for a while, I looked up through my hair explosion. Sam was sitting on the couch above me, reading a book. Dean was sitting up on his bed, Sam’s computer on his stomach and headphones on. They weren’t talking, but it didn’t have a tense air or anything. They just weren’t saying anything.

Sam saw me rolling onto my belly to check the time on my phone, and nudged me with his foot.

“Hey. You sleep okay?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Pretty much. I woke up once, but I had a glass of water and got back to sleep.”

Sam nodded. “I heard you get up. Nightmare?”

Brushing my hair back, I started to sit up. Clearly I wasn’t having any long term effects from that blow to the head, cos I felt just fine.

“Kind of. Nothing too awful.”

It had just been a vague sort of nightmare. I couldn’t even remember much of what it had been about, but there was definitely snow involved, and that was pretty usual for my nightmares. I’d be stuck in the snow, with no way to keep warm, and in danger of freezing to death. I understood where that fear came from, but it was still just as upsetting every time.

“Well, I figured I’d let you sleep,” he said, with a sympathetic smile.

I got to my feet and gave his shoulder a little pat of thanks on my way to the bathroom. It was sweet how Sam was always looking after me, even in those little ways. He was always thinking about other people. He got coffee for Dean and I every morning.

Once I was up and awake and showered, I got my own book and sat down next to Sam to do some reading until lunch time. It was Christmas Day, so there wouldn’t be a lot of point leaving the motel. The gas station would be open, but nowhere else.

It was nice, just sitting and hanging out. Dean was apparently watching a movie, and he seemed to be pretty interested in it. My book was a good one. I’d never read it before, but Sam had given it to me, and I’d picked out a favourite of mine for him. I pulled my blanket up onto the couch with me, but over time, I noticed that it had drifted across Sam’s lap too.

I poked him with my big toe.

“Hey! You got your own blanket!”

“I like yours,” he smiled, mischievous dimples popping out. I poked him again, and he responded by putting his book down and seizing my foot.

The squeals I let out as he dug his fingers into my sides were more than enough to disturb Dean. I caught sight of him moving from his bed to the bathroom.

“Help!” I screamed. “Help me!”

He just shook his head and kept moving. “Damn howler monkey…”

As soon as the door was shut and he was in the bathroom, Sam let me go. He looked behind to make sure and then beckoned me with his finger.

“I’m not coming closer, you’re a torturer.”

But he looked serious, so I figured he wanted to say something about Dean. I sat up next to him so he could talk low.

“Okay… So… I’ve been thinking about what Dean said and… I think he’s right. I mean… he wants to do Christmas. So, I’ll do it.” He sighed. “Um… There’s no one else here, so I thought maybe I could get you another room for the night. You can just hang out on your own, read, watch movies or whatever. Avoid the whole thing.”

A bed for the night and some time to myself did sound pretty nice. Especially if I was avoiding Christmas. It was sweet of Sam to want to do that for Dean, though, even though it hurt him to think about it being his brother’s last year. If this was what Dean wanted, Sam was willing to do it, regardless of his own feelings.

If he could do that… bear with it, maybe I could. It wouldn’t be easy, but I’d spent every year locking myself away and avoiding Christmas and that hadn’t been easy either. In fact, it was the worst. I was never happy. All I did was dwell on my mom and my past and how terrified I’d been. It wasn’t pleasant.

So… could Christmas be any worse than ignoring Christmas and pretending it wasn’t happening? I’d always avoided talking about what had happened, and when I finally did, I felt better. So, maybe Christmas wouldn’t be so bad either. Just this once. For Dean’s sake.

I shrugged, mostly to myself. “Um… so… what if I tried it? For Dean. I… I’m not saying I’m gonna love it, but I can try it. If it gets too much, then I’ll leave, but… if it’s what Dean wants, I’ll try it.”

Sam had me in a hug so fast, I didn’t see it coming. I just finished my sentence and next thing I knew, I was squashed against Sam’s chest. Damn, he always smelt so good…

Then he was letting me go. “Okay… I gotta get some stuff. I’ll offer to get lunch and then bring back what we need.”

“I’ll help,” I said. If I was going to try doing Christmas, I might as well be useful and help Sam out with it. “Dean won’t wonder what the bags are if I tell him it’s girl stuff.”

Sam smiled. “Are you sure? I don’t want you to get overwhelmed.”

I shook my head. No, I wasn’t sure at all. But how long could I last being terrified by Christmas? It happened every year and it wasn’t likely to stop. Supposing I had my own kids someday… Would they have to miss out on it, because I was too afraid? Would Dean have to feel guilty today? No! That wasn’t fair.

Fear had gained me nothing, so it was time to breathe deep and fight through it.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Teach me how to Christmas, Sam.”

We heard the toilet flush then, and so Sam just mouthed “thankyou” to me as Dean came out and started making his way back to the bed.

Sam stood up, offering me a hand.

“We’re going to the gas station,” he said, as he pulled me onto my feet. “We’ll get burritos.”

Dean sniggered. “Ha. Going to the gas station. Never heard it called that before.”

“Ha ha,” I scowled. He didn’t deserve Christmas. “I just need to get some stuff, okay. Girl stuff.”

He made the kind of face you’d expect if I told him I was heading out to drown kittens. He threw Sam the keys, though, and on the way out the door, he warned us to keep it in the gas station bathroom and not defile his baby.

“Dean, if we were gonna do it, we’d kick you out of the room and use your bed. Jesus!”

His disgusted face was its own reward and I felt enough good will towards him to follow through with the plan.

* * *

It’s hard to do Christmas with just what you can buy at a gas station, but it was a Gas Mart, so they had some food, and they even had a few lame decorations to help make it work. We couldn’t have too much either or it would look weird hauling it into the motel room.

We decided to send Dean out to get beer a bit later in the night, and then we could set everything up while he was out and surprise him.

I just followed Sam around, and he asked me my opinion, but I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just kept agreeing with him. We found a sign that said Merry Christmas, and a real cheap plastic tree. In the same area, there were packets of decorations. Those weird ball things, and different coloured lights. People definitely put those on trees, and Sam looked kind of proud as I showed them to him and asked if it was right. He said it was and I put them in the basket.

Then he had me take everything out to the car and rearrange it so Dean wouldn’t see anything, while he microwaved the burritos. He came back with another bag, and the hot burritos, which he gave me to hold while we drove back.

Me carrying two black shopping bags didn’t look suspicious to Dean at all, and he totally ignored me as I went over to my duffle and tried to put them up against the wall and sort of underneath it, so he wouldn’t see what was in them.

After that, we ate lunch and then carried on like before. Dean watched another movie. Sam finished his book and took his laptop back, so Dean came down to the couch next to me. He turned on the TV, and I noticed he didn’t stop on anything remotely Christmas related. He was obviously trying to be careful around me, and maybe Sam too, which was so good of him. I hoped he was really surprised and didn’t see the whole thing coming.

At five o’clock, Sam reminded Dean about the football game, and pretended to be frustrated that we hadn’t remembered beer earlier. Dean took the hint, and declared he wasn’t watching football without beer, so he went out to get it. But we owed him big.

He wouldn’t be gone long, so we had to scramble. The little tree had to be removed from its bag and stretched out, pulling each of the branches away from the centre. I offered to do it, and as I did so, I could feel my anxiety rising.

There was nothing to be worried about. The act of celebrating Christmas wasn’t going to mean bad things happened to me. I wasn’t a defenceless toddler anymore, and even if I was, I had Sam and Dean with me. It’d be okay. I reminded myself of that and kept breathing, as I helped Sam hang Pine Tree air fresheners on the tree. That was cute! Creative.

By the time I’d poured out three cups of eggnog all ready, I was feeling very on edge. I begged Sam to finish up by himself, and he looked concerned as he told me of course he would. I locked myself in the bathroom, yet again.

But this time I didn’t sink to the floor in sudden, horrified panic. I just needed a few minutes to compose myself, that was all. We were having Christmas because Dean wanted to, and it wouldn’t be very good if I was terrified the whole time.

It was barely even Christmas. We were just going to drink eggnog and watch football with beer and potato chips. The we’d probably get burritos again, because the options were kind of limited. It was just a football game… With decorations. That was all. I just needed to focus on who I was with and what we were doing; nothing wildly different than any other week. We watched the game together all the time. It was no big deal.

I was reminding myself of that when I heard Dean come back.

“What is this?” he asked Sam.

“What do you think it is. It’s… uh… it’s Christmas,” Sam told him.

I could do it. I could go out there. I took three deep breaths and opened the door.

“Ellie?” asked Dean, looking at me in absolute amazement. “You’re in on this?”

I nodded, so happy to see the smile on his face. He liked it. He hadn’t expected it. And he’d never ever say it, but he really appreciated us doing this for him.

“Try the eggnog,” said Sam, offering the cup. He held up the whiskey. “Let me know if it needs some more kick.”

Dean took an enthusiastic sip and coughed, his face blank and his mouth an unreadable straight line. “No, we’re good.”

“Yeah?” asked Sam.

“Yeah,” Dean told him.

Sam turned away and Dean pulled a face at me gesturing to the cup. His expression suggested that the eggnog had been like drinking straight bleach. I giggled, but when Sam turned around again, both of us just gave him a polite smile.

“Okay,” said Sam. “Let’s teach Ellie how to Christmas. Come here, Pea.”

He pulled my hand to get me to sit next to him on the sofa, and Dean sat on my other side.

I thought Dean just had beer in the bag, but when he reached in, he pulled out three packages, all wrapped up, pretty rough, in brown paper. He handed two of them to Sam.

“Merry Christmas, Sam.”

The third one he looked at and then he smiled at me. “I just thought I’d get you something,” he said. “You know, cos this is such a crappy day for you. It wasn’t gonna be a Christmas present. But… I guess, Merry Christmas, Princess.”

He handed me one of his brown paper parcels and I nearly burst straight into tears. I totally forgot about the whole present thing, and I didn’t get him anything. I wasn’t doing Christmas right at all. But he got me a little present, not because it was Christmas, exactly, but just because he thought I might be sad and need something to cheer me up.

I grabbed him round the neck and hugged him. I felt his arms around me and his chin resting on top of my head.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded as I let go, and when I looked into his soft green eyes, I wondered why he was smiling the way he was. Like he had a secret. He was looking behind me. I turned around.

Sam also had three packages, that he had produced from somewhere. His were wrapped in newspaper. He held out a flat one to me and handed the other two to Dean.

“Sam!” I scolded and in that moment, it was very debatable which brother had the more beautiful, genuine smile.

“Merry Christmas Dean. And you, Pea.”

I managed to hold back my tears, because Sam was starting to unwrap the first of his presents from Dean. He laughed and showed them to me. Porn.

“Skin mags!” he exclaimed, and while he retained an attitude like Dean was amusing for giving them to him, I was pretty sure he would be keeping them. “And… shaving cream!” he announced, opening the other. A good practical gift, available at the Gas Mart.

“You like?” asked Dean.

Sam smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.”

Dean unwrapped his pretty quick, and it was fun to watch him. This part of Christmas was good. Everyone was happy and they got a nice present to unwrap. That was the best part of birthdays, making someone happy. Christmas meant gifts for lots of people, so you could make them all happy. That was cool.

“Look at this, Ellie,” Dean announced, holding up his candy bar and his engine oil. “Fuel for me and fuel for my baby. These are awesome. Thanks.”

Sam nudged me. “Go on. Open yours.”

I’d been so amazed and touched at getting presents, that I’d forgotten I was actually supposed to open them. Just the fact they existed had brought me almost to tears. The boys were both watching me, as I opened Sam’s first.

I got magazines too, but mine weren’t porn. _Cosmopolitan_ and _Vogue_. I had a tendency, every now and again, to buy myself a magazine, if something on the cover caught my eye or I wanted the free sample. I pretended like they were a thing I just read casually, but when I got one, I would keep it for ages and read it cover to cover.

Cosmo was my favourite, too.

“Oh my God!” I said, flipping through it. “Thankyou, Sam!”

“Open Dean’s,” he reminded me, wisely, as otherwise I might have started reading the make up tips and gotten really engrossed.

But first, I had to grab Sam and give him a kiss on the cheek. He held me for quite a while, before letting me go. “Now open it!” he scolded.

Maybe he was as excited as me to see what Dean had bought me at the Gas Mart. The package was too big to hold in one hand, but not huge. It was also kind of a weird shape, like a bunch of stuff wrapped up together.

I ripped off the paper and a bunch of things fell out into my lap. My favourite shampoo and conditioner, the apple-scented version. There was a four pack of lipgloss, all fruity flavours too: strawberry, mango, grape and red apple. Then there was the soap, two packets: one mango scented and the other lemon.

Dean got me. I’d never mentioned it, but he’d clearly noticed that I liked all my beauty products to smell like fruit. I just loved the smell of fruits. I didn’t even care what kind. They all just smelt so amazing, and I was always looking to bathe myself in it.

I squeaked with joy and hugged Dean again, before ripping open the packet of lip gloss. I held them out to show Sam, intimating that he ought to pick one for me.

He smiled. “Mango.”

I put some on, and ran to put everything else in my bag, though I kept the mango gloss in my pocket, and my copy of _Cosmo_ in my hands. I was definitely going to read that after the game.

So, that was the Christmas part over, really. We’d decorated the room and handed out presents and nothing bad had come of it. Except that I felt awful about something.

“I’m sorry,” I said, getting back onto the couch between the boys. “I… um… I forgot about presents. I should have got you guys something.”

Dean’s arm went immediately around my waist and he pulled me into him so he could get his fist into my poor hair and ruffle me up.

“Are you kidding me? Ellie! You’re doing Christmas!”

“What could you possibly give us that’s better than that?” Sam agreed.

It was maybe kind of cliche and sappy, but I was genuinely grateful to think that they considered me being with them to be a gift. Especially when Dean had been so reluctant to have me with them in the first place.

I grabbed them with one arm each and squeezed them into me.

“Aw, I love you guys too!”

* * *

We watched the football, all three of us crammed onto that small couch. I tried my first eggnog and wow, Dean was not wrong. It definitely didn’t need any more kick. We had a few beers each, and I was just wondering who would have to go out and get some more burritos for dinner, when Sam revealed the food he’d got at the Gas Mart without me knowing.

We had to cook everything one at a time in our tiny motel microwave, but that was okay. I cooked while the boys watched the game. We filled up on potato chips as an appetiser, and then there were pizza subs, which are kinda soggy when you nuke them, but still good. After that, Sam taught me about the joys of tiny pies filled with mashed up fruit. Apparently they’re a Christmas thing, and I gotta say, I could get behind those.

The second half of the game we had popcorn, though Dean and I used it more to throw at each other than to eat. By the end of the game I’d had plenty of beers and way more eggnog than was good for me, but it had helped take the edge off the carols and Christmas themed sales in every damn commercial break.

I was half on top of Dean, as he struggled to avoid my attempts to put lipgloss on him, when my cell rang. It was my Dad, just checking up. I managed to tell him Merry Christmas, which completely blew his mind, but he sounded happy that I was getting through and even trying to get into the spirit. I must have been pretty wasted, though, because I started to cry about my presents and sobbed hysterically that Sam and Dean were my best friends in the whole wide world and I just love them so much, Daddy, sooooooo much. He eventually had me give the phone to Sam, who talked to him while I apologised to Dean and offered to put the lip gloss on him by “direct lip-to-lip transfer”. He politely declined.

After that, Sam and Dean opened the pack of candy canes, but that was a bit too much for me. I’d gotten strawberry bubblegum though, so I was set. If only they’d had pineapple chocolate things, my day would have been made. I could probably tolerate carols if I was drunk and had pineapple chunks. As it was, the boys had to tolerate my repeated popping as I read the _Cosmo_ quiz questions out loud and made them answer.

Just FYI: Dean’s dating style was “The Flirty Girl”, which meant he wasn’t looking for anything serious, but that he communicated that and was honest about his needs. Sam got “Looking For The One”, which is probably self explanatory. My result was “Cautious Dreamer”, and it said that while I was looking for happily ever after and a real relationship, I tended to let my fear of the unknown stop me from committing to anything. Shut up, _Cosmo_. You don’t know me!

I was ranting on the subject of my alleged fear of commitment and how it wasn’t my fault if everyone I’d ever dated was an asshole, when I started to get really drowsy. Plenty of eggnog and a low level of anxiety for several hours had tired me out completely, and I drifted off to sleep on the couch.


	59. Chapter 58: Freakin' Witches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once again, poor Ellie has been through the wars, but she’s still going to do her best to solve this case. Much to Dean’s joy, it involves witches. Dean loves witches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it's been so long!!! I was on holiday and then I wrote a series of Special Chapters, which are Tumblr Exclusive. But please feel free to check them out at:  
> http://winchestersplusone.tumblr.com/masterlist  
> (If you only read one Special Chapter ever in the course of your life, make it "The Plan". Trust me on this.)
> 
> This Chapter is set during 3x09: Malleus Malificarum

I was cross legged in the middle of the bed, cards in my right hand, rubbing absently at my stitches with my left.

“Um…” I looked down at my cards again, trying to ignore Sam’s smug little smile. He was only doing it to put me off. My cards were all over the place. There was no way I could make a meld. Still, there were already three twos sitting between us, so I could just add my two of diamonds to that.

I still had to discard, so I picked the highest, a king, and waited for Sam to stop chuckling at my misfortune and take his turn. He was already at two-hundred eighty three points and we were only playing to three hundred. My hand as it stood was worth well over seventeen points to him if he won the round. And he would.

Still with his smug smile, he picked up from the draw pile and raised an eyebrow at the result. Then he placed it straight down on the bed in front of him. It was the four of clubs. He took another card slowly from his hand and placed it beside. The five of clubs. His meld had to be a minimum of three cards, but it could be more. He had three left in his hand. Next he neatly laid down the six. Going back to his hand again, he smiled at me the whole time, forcing me to watch each card one at a time, agonisingly slowly. The seven came down next and I knew before he even did it that he had one more. He finally placed down the eight, looking right into my face as he did so, his little dimples peeking out on each side of his smile.

I threw my remaining cards at him with a groan. “You win. Again!”

Sam was such a bitch at games. Whether it was Rummy or Scrabble or even something as lame as Happy Families, he would treat it like he was winning the World Championship Poker. Worse.

“We should play for money next time,” he said. “Unless you’re scared.”

“Why are you such an asshole?” I asked. “I’m hurt! Haven’t you seen my stitches?”

It was my fifth day camped in the motel. Honestly, why was it always me? Pretty much as soon as my cracked rib and neck wound had cleared up enough for me to get back into some serious killing- rrrrrrrrip. A wendigo claw sliced through my lower leg. Totally my own fault, of course. Wrong place at the wrong time.

Once the wendigo was dead, Sam had carried me down the mountain, poor thing. And poor me, too. Ninety minutes in Sam’s obscenely manly arms and I was dripping blood and fading in and out of consciousness. What’s the point if you can’t enjoy it?

Anyway, I’d needed more medical care than our first aid kit could provide and ended up at an all night clinic. Two layers of stitches and everything: those dissolvable ones in the muscle and then more to knit my skin together. The pain was the worst part. Dean felt so sorry for me, he didn’t even get mad about me bleeding in his car.

As we were packing up the cards, Dean came back. He’d been out getting some lunch.

“He kick your ass again?” he asked, throwing a folded newspaper down onto the bed between us.

“Shut up!” As Dean started unloading the lunch bag onto the table, I left Sam to gather the rest of the cards, and picked up the newspaper. He’d circled something.

“Mysterious death in New England...” I read. “Case?”

“Read it,” said Dean, putting the first of his fries in his mouth before he’d even sat down.

_Authorities in Sturbridge Massachusetts are at a loss to explain the death of local woman Janet Dutton. Dutton, 34, died suddenly Friday night in a bizarre series of events. Husband Paul Dutton, 37, told police he and his wife had just returned home from a party when she went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. Hearing her call for him, he went upstairs to find her panicking, saying there was something wrong with her teeth. “It looked like she was holding teeth in her hand. I went towards the bathroom to help her and the door slammed shut and bolted itself. I couldn’t open it. I heard her coughing and gagging on the other side. It sounded like she was choking.”_

_According to Mr Dutton, when he kicked open the door, he found Janet dead. All her teeth were scattered around the bathroom. Police and ambulance arrived on the scene shortly afterwards and Mrs Dutton was pronounced dead._

_The coroner’s initial report states that Mrs Dutton died from asphyxiation when she choked on her own blood. A spokesman for the coroner’s department refused to comment on the case and was not able to say when more details would be made available._

_There are no known diseases which can cause the sudden loss of all teeth and local police have denied any evidence of foul play…_

The article went on longer, but I had already read enough. It didn’t take a genius.

“Witches?” I asked.

“Gotta be witches,” Sam agreed.

Dean shuddered. “Freaks. So… you said you’re getting cabin fever, Princess. Massachusetts sound like fun to you?”

“You know how I love that happenin’ New England scene,” I said, trying to reach my burger by leaning towards the table.

I couldn’t reach, but I just made grabbing motions with both my hands until Dean decided I looked pathetic enough to just hand me my food. I was able to get up and stand on my leg again, but it was a bit of an effort every time. Plus, I was already naturally pretty lazy.

I’d been on painkillers for a little while, but they made me kind of wacky, so I’d stopped taking them. I still had to devise a way to steal Dean’s phone and eliminate the video evidence of me singing and dancing to the Spice Girls.

I sat back on the bed to eat my burger while Sam got up to get his lunch. Salad again. Sam always made me feel bad about my dietary choices. Not on purpose, of course! He’d never remark on my weight. But he often went for the salad instead of the burger, or if he had the burger, he skipped the fries. No wonder he looked like he’d been carved in marble while I was pudgy.

Then again, Dean ate as much crap as I did, and still managed to have pecs I wanted to rub my face all over. Must have been good genes. I _had_ gained some muscle tone since I started hunting full time. I was never going to be in the Winchester league though, not unless I worked out eight hours a day and only ate protein bars. And frankly, who can be bothered?

 

* * *

 

Right after lunch, we packed up and prepared for the drive. It was only about six hours, so we hit town around seven o’clock and figured we’d get a good night’s sleep in before starting on the case in the morning.

With my injured leg, I didn’t know how much help I was going to be. I certainly couldn’t be involved in the actual hunting and killing part. But I was feeling like I’d be able to go with with the guys and do my consultant act while they questioned the husband.

While getting dinner at a diner in town, we checked the local newspaper to read more about the case. Since it was the end of the night, the waitress let us take the paper with us and we headed to a motel.

I made Sam take one of the beds. I didn’t need to be treated soft anymore. Not hunting was a different thing. That was about me being unable to keep up and not wanting to risk my weakness endangering the others. But I could walk on the leg, however much it hurt, and it no longer mattered if I slept on a mattress or on my bedroll. Sam protested, but I told him it didn’t matter where he slept, I still wouldn’t take the bed.

As we each got ready for bed, we discussed the plan. I thought CDC was a good bet for a pretext. We already had the IDs for that and such a sudden, bloody death with no apparent external influence could conceivably be a disease.

 

* * *

 

 

The next morning, I had to choose my wardrobe carefully. It’s so easy being a dude. Suits work for any professional context. The CDC weren’t likely to have a sketch artist, so my usual underdressed but still professional ensemble was not going to work. What I needed was a lab coat. Then the boys could always claim I was a scientist of some kind. There are loads of kinds of scientist and no one ever questions a white coat.

“I want a lab coat,” I told Dean absently, as I rummaged through my bag.

He made a strange noise, but as he was behind me, I couldn’t see his face. “I see that. White coat, glasses, hair in a bun. You’d be like the uptight scientist chick in the first half of the movie.”

I rolled my eyes, pulling out my frustratingly crumpled suit pants. “Before the hero realises how hot I am?” I asked.

He chuckled as I gathered together my outfit and sat back to wait for Sam to finish in the bathroom.

Since I figured I wouldn’t need to go full FBI on my hair, I was able to get it together quickly and we were at the Dutton house within a half hour.

Paul Dutton was pretty nondescript. He was by no means an ugly man, but nor was he stunningly handsome. He was about as tall as Dean and maybe a little skinnier. You wouldn’t look twice at him in the street.

Satisfied by our IDs, he let us into the house and took us upstairs. His wife, Janet, had died in the ensuite of the master bedroom.

“Through here?” asked Sam, peeking in as Dean and Mr Dutton entered behind us.

“Yeah... “ Paul said. “It’s all cleaned up now, but it was…” He sat down on the edge of the bed.

Sam headed into the bathroom, leaving Dean and I to ask about Janet.

“I’m so sorry,” I offered. “I’m sure it’s a terrible shock.” It must have been horrific to find his wife dead and bloody, her teeth scattered all over the bathroom.

“She was so scared,” he said. “I couldn’t help. I couldn’t do anything to stop it. And I’ve talked to the police, and I’ve talked to the medical examiner and no one can explain it.”

“Well, that’s why they put the call in to us, Mr Dutton,” Dean said.

“But, the CDC? That’s disease control, right? What do you think, it’s some kind of virus?”

“We can’t rule out anything just yet,” I said, as Sam started to close the bathroom door, torch in hand.

“Did Janet have any enemies?” Dean asked.

Mr Dutton looked… odd. Not confused, exactly. Surprised by the question, maybe. “I’m sorry?”

“We’re just wondering if anybody might have wanted to hurt your wife,” I said.

He stood up, propelled upward by his concern. “Wait… What are you saying? That somebody poisoned her.”

“We just have to cover every base here,” Dean said, in his most reassuring tone.

“Well, I mean, what kind of poison?” Dutton asked, apparently stuck on that train of thought. “You think a person could have done this?”

He didn’t really sound shocked or horrified by the thought someone might have poisoned his wife. It was hard to put my finger on exactly what emotion he was displaying. It wasn’t disbelief, exactly. And not surprise this time. More like… concern? For himself, maybe. Like he might be next.

“Would anyone want to?” I asked.

“What? No!” he insisted. “No, no, there’s just no one that could’ve…”

He looked over Dean’s shoulder as Sam opened the bathroom door again. I went over to Sam, to make a show of consulting with him, as Dean kept talking to our slightly odd husband.

“You got everything you need?” I asked Sam, in what I hoped sounded like one professional speaking to another. I suppose it was, in a sense.

“Yes, I think so,” he said, and I could tell from his tone that he’d found something.

 

* * *

 

 

Outside the house, as a light drizzle fell on us, Sam slowed down until I was walking level beside him. Then he dropped something into my hand. It was a brown bag, tied up with some kind of string. Exactly the kind of shit witches were into. The bag looked like it was made of leather, probably some kind of ritual meaning behind the choice of animal.

I untied the string and opened the little bag up in my hand. Inside there was a rectangle of cloth, some kind of cotton blend, in a floral pattern. There were very small bones and a few teeth.

“That dude seem a little evasive to you?” Dean asked, looking over his shoulder.

“I don’t know,” Sam said, nodding at my hands. “I was under a sink, pulling that out.”

Dean slowed down his own walk to come up beside us. “Awww… gross…”

“Definitely a hex bag,” I said. “The cloth’ll be something of Janet’s. Bird bones, you reckon? Or mouse?”

“Bird,” Sam said, poking at one. “That’s from up near the wing. And that looks like a rabbit’s tooth.”

“So… witch?” Dean asked, although it wasn’t really a question. No one else would put a little bag designed to curse someone under a bathroom sink.

“And this isn’t an amateur like crazy Heather back in North Carolina. This is Old World black magic, Dean. I mean, warts and all.”

Dean had seen enough of the hex bag, and he unlocked the car. He turned to look at us before he got in.

“I hate witches,” he said, as I started putting the hex bag back together. “They’re always spewing their bodily fluids everywhere.”

I laughed. They kinda were.

“Pretty much,” Sam agreed.

“It’s creepy, you know,” Dean said, getting into the car. “It’s downright unsanitary.”

“Well,” I got into the backseat slowly and carefully, trying to avoid hurting my leg. Even a half hour walking on it was sort of painful. “Someone had it out for Janet.”

“Someone who snuck into that house and planted the bag,” said Dean. “So what are we thinking, we’re uh… looking for some old craggy blair bitch in the woods.”

If only it were that easy. Sam shook his head as he got into the shotgun seat. “No. It could be anyone. Neighbour, coworker, man, woman… that’s the problem Dean. They’re human. They’re like everyone else.”

“Great. How do we find ‘em?”

“It’s gotta be someone who had access to the house, right?” I asked. “And… this wasn’t some random attack. They made the woman choke on her own teeth. That takes some serious hate.”

“Right,” Sam agreed. “We find the motive…”

“We find the murderer,” said Dean, starting the engine.

I looked out at the Dutton house as we pulled away from the kerb. They seemed like pretty ordinary suburban types. Quite a nice house, two stories and in the kind of area where all the lawns are neat and even. In my experience, people like that usually had three kinds of Deep Dark Secret. There was the guy ripping off their employer, there was the gambling addict and then…

“Bet you fifty bucks Paul Dutton is a dirty cheater,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” Sam asked.

“He’s got something to hide. Dean felt it too.”

“Definitely,” Dean agreed. “We asked if anyone had it in for his wife and he got very cagey.”

“Someone wanted Janet dead and he knew it. Fifty bucks says it was the other woman.” I considered for a second. “Or man.”

“No bet,” Dean said. “You’re definitely right.”

“So… maybe we keep an eye on Paul?” Sam suggested. “We follow him around, see if he goes to see this mystery lover?”

“Well, if he’s in on it, he’s gonna go. And if he’s not, he’s gotta be wondering,” Dean said. “Ellie, you up for this? It could get physical.”

I was so up for it. But I had a stupid sensible side that knew it was a bad idea to go out on a case that might involve actually coming into contact with our witch. I might have to run or worse, fight. I sighed.

“Take me back to the motel. I’ll look into the hex bag, see if it can give us any clues about the witch.”

“Sorry, Pea,” Sam said. “I know you hate being on the bench.”

I really did. The whole point of hunting with the Winchesters was that I would get to be out there, in the heat of the moment. Being stuck inside, doing all the research was something I could do at home. I probably _could_ go out and risk it on my injured leg, but then healing would just take longer. Why did it always have to be me? It felt very Damsel in Distress. Next thing I’d be screaming and fainting and probably twisting my ankle like the heroine of a crappy sixties action movie. That right there was probably Dean’s twisted fantasy.

“Just bring me back food,” I sighed.

 

* * *

 

 

Just between you and me, I was a freakin’ genius to scan all those books out of Dad’s library. Three hours with the hex bag open on the table and two scanned tomes to flip between and I knew all.

Well… not all… I hadn’t got the name and address of our witch or anything, but I’d garnered everything it was possible to learn from the bag. The way it was made, the choice of bones, the leather: all that told me a lot about the kind of witchcraft we were dealing with.

It was getting dark and the boys still weren’t back. I called Sam.

“Hey,” he said, “How you doing?”

“Fine,” I told him. “Took one of the little painkillers, and I’ve basically been resting it. How’s life out in the field?”

“Oh, you are missing out,” he said, dripping with sarcasm. “First, we watched him hang out in his house for a few hours, but then… then he went to the grocery store.”

I laughed. While I didn’t like being left out of the action, I had never been a big fan of stakeouts. I was probably more comfortable than they were, and less bored.

“Well, I got some hex bag fun facts for ya. Put me on speaker.”

I could hear a few bumps and scrapes as Sam sorted it out, and then I could hear Dean’s voice, a little muffled and muddy. “Hey, Princess. What you got?”

“Well, this is some old school magic. We’re talking pre-Roman. This is the kind of shit witches were into back in BC.”

“Wow, really?” Dean asked.

“Some of it,” I said, with a shrug they couldn’t see. “The bag wasn’t designed to do any specific damage. It’s more like a kind of conduit. Whatever spell the witch wanted to work on Janet, they needed a double whammy. So, the hex bag had to be in the bathroom, but they would have had something of hers when they did the spell, too. Probably something to do with the mouth.”

“What, like one of her teeth?” Dean asked.

“Seems unlikely,” Sam said. “Maybe her toothbrush?”

I shrugged again. I needed to start video-calling with the boys so they could see my fascinating and diverse range of physical responses. “Makes sense. Either way, they had to have access to the house to place the bag and get hold of something of Janet’s. So… it’s possible hubby is in on it. Maybe he did it? That’s why he’s not going anywhere…”

“I told you, he went grocery shopping,” Sam said. “Such a thrill.”

I smiled. When Sam and I did a stake out together, we usually played word games, or even just talked. Not to toot my own horn, but no way Dean’s as much fun as me.

“Did he buy dead birds and rabbit skulls?”

Dean sounded as bored as his brother. “Seemed more like milk.”

“Inconclusive,” I said. “Well… you boys stick at it and I’ll stay here. Be good if I can find out how to neutralise a witch. Maybe we can take away the power instead of having to kill ‘em?”

“You can try,” Sam said. “We’ll call you if anything happens.”

“Or if it doesn’t and we get bored,” added Dean.

“Aw, you find me interesting now? I’m growing on ya.”

"Like fungus," said Dean.

I just laughed at him as I hung up. He could deny it as much as he wanted, but Dean liked me just fine. He’d probably even miss me if I went home.


	60. Chapter 59: Taking Sides

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and the boys deal with a witch situation. And then a very divisive figure arrives with some advice for Sam.

I ordered in pizza. I was sitting on Dean’s bed, sore leg resting, and taking the opportunity to binge eat with no judgement, when the boys called. I was watching the local news, just in case something witchy came up, so I turned it down, swallowed a mouthful of cheese-stuffed crust and picked up.

“Hey Dean. Any luck?”

“Ha. You could say that. Paul almost choked to death on a burger.”

Damn. It was worth asking, but I didn’t have much confidence. “I don’t suppose he just swallowed the wrong way?”

“It was crawling with maggots. Sam found a hex bag.”

First they hit Janet with choking on her own teeth and then they get Paul with maggots in the burger. Someone _really_ had it in for the Duttons. “Is he okay?”

“He’s freaked out,” Dean said. “But he’s gonna be fine. You were right, though.”

For a moment I couldn’t remember what I’d said that I might be right about, but then it came back to me. “He’s a cheater, huh?”

Dean gave a little whistle. “Oh yeah. He says she was crazy, tried to blackmail him and he broke it off. We’re headed round to hers now. Name’s Amanda Burns. See what you can find out.”

I sighed. The guys were off to confront a particularly vicious witch, who might even have been two-thousand years old! And I was going to stay in the motel room with my laptop and a large pepperoni and ham with melty cheese in the crust. But hey, at least I got to hack the county records.

Amanda Burns turned out to be even more boring than a night in with a pizza. Her birth certificate said she was born right there in town, and so were her parents and their parents. She had school records from local elementary and high schools. She made a local paper when she was thirteen because she wrote a prize-winning essay for her civics class. She was not married. She had a driver’s license with a photo that probably didn’t do her justice. She got a lot of parking fines, but she always paid them.

She paid her taxes on time. She owned her home but hadn’t finished the mortgage repayments. She was a dental nurse. Her sister was a marketing consultant, married with two kids. It was hard to imagine a less threatening person.

The boys came back just as I was guiltily brushing the crumbs off Dean’s bed. I climbed back on top of the blankets as they came through the door. Before he even had both feet inside the room, Sam tossed a hex bag at me. I caught it with one hand and reached for the string.

“No! Not on my bed!” Dean yelled, shutting the door behind him. “If you’re gonna open that skeezy thing, do it someplace else.”

I got up and moved over to the table, setting the bag down so I could open it out flat on the table. It was mostly very small bones, but there was also a tuft of hair and what looked like shards of some kind of hardwood.

“This the bag from Paul?” I asked.

“Nope, I burned that,” Sam said. “ _This_ bag was in Amanda Burns’ house. Along with her corpse.”

I looked up in surprise. “Shit. What happened?”

“Wrists slashed,” Sam said, as he took off his jacket. “Repeatedly.”

“Wow,” I poked at the little ball of hair. It was dark brown, so it might have been Amanda’s own, but both the Duttons had dark hair too. “Suicide?”

“Nope,” said Dean, opening the fridge. He looked up at the sky in a thankful prayer to whoever was up there. He reached for a beer and started opening it immediately. “Someone used that thing to kill her.”

Huh. So someone had it in for all three people in this little love triangle. Weird.

“So we got an unknown witch and three victims…”

“Uh uh!” Dean said, handing a beer to Sam. “Because Amanda had a little hobby. A little blood and bones, pentagrams, dead rabbit hanging from the ceiling kinda hobby.”

I looked to Sam as he came over. Beer in hand, he leant against the window beside me, looking over my shoulder as I used my pencil to separate out the contents of the hex bag. I pushed a bone over here and a wood shaving to there, trying to figure out exactly what was in it.

“So… Amanda kills Janet. Tries to finish Paul. And then someone else offs Amanda?” I asked.

“Yep,” said Sam. “I’m thinking coven. Maybe getting her revenge on the Duttons was a little extracurricular and Amanda was punished for it?”

“Makes sense,” I agreed, pretending I hadn’t noticed how good Sam looked as he casually lounged alongside me. _His legs were so long_. “This is basically the same stuff as in the bag from Janet’s bathroom, so it could easily be the same coven.”

“What have you got on Amanda?” Dean asked. He sat down on his bed, and looked down at the blanket suspiciously for a moment. He brushed something away, possibly a crumb, but said nothing about it.

“Nothing good,” I explained. “Law abiding, except that she thought parking signs only applied to other people.”

“Plus the occult murder,” Sam noted.

I smiled. “Yeah. And that. But on paper, she’s pretty clean. I’m guessing her house was in a suburban area? SUVs and tidy lawns, that kind of neighbourhood?”

“Yeah,” said the boys, in unison.

“As to who her coven might be, I got nothing. Family? Friends? People she met at the tennis club? Could be anybody.”

“Well, I say we canvass the neighbourhood tomorrow,” Dean suggested. “See what the rest of the PTA crowd have to say about Amanda.”

“Count me in!” I said, with more enthusiasm than I had intended. “I mean… I’m feeling up to coming with you.”

Dean chuckled and Sam smiled, taking another sip of his beer.

 

* * *

 

 

We split up to interview Amanda’s neighbours. It being a sunny Saturday, a lot of families weren’t home, but there were plenty more that were. My leg was a bit sore from the afternoon’s walking, but I was okay. I was finishing off the last of the houses assigned to me when Sam came out of a house across the street. Seeing me, he started to cross over.

“And what about her friends?” I asked. “Anyone around here?”

The guy I was interviewing, Henry, had been outside watering his lawn when I arrived. I’d seen him from a ways down the street, and he must have seen me, so he hadn’t been surprised when I approached him. He’d been chatty. Dean said women were a great source of local gossip, but he was just stereotyping. I found men plenty forthcoming.

“I think she and Jack Gordon’s wife are pretty tight. I work with Jack… What was her name? Lisa? Laura?”

“Liz?” I asked. A few people had mentioned an Elizabeth Gordon as being a friend of Amanda’s.

“Yeah. I got an address if you like,” he said, looking at Sam as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Detective,” Sam said, with a nod.

“Detective. This is my colleague, Detective Bachman,” I told Henry. “This gentleman has an address for a close friend of our victim.”

“Great,” Sam said, as Henry reached into his pocket for his phone.

As he looked through the phone, I looked up at Sam and just raised my eyebrows, my silent way of asking if he’d found anything out. He shook his head.

“You’re pretty young for a Detective,” said Henry, as he looked down at his phone. “What are you, twenty-one?”

My age did make my detective cover story somewhat implausible, but I didn’t look _that_ young. “Twenty-five,” I said.

He smiled as he looked up. “Well you look younger,” he said.

He was nearing fifty, so maybe everyone under a certain age looked young to him. My dad felt like that sometimes. “Thankyou,” I said, because it was polite and I didn’t really know what else to say.

“What makes a young girl want to be a cop anyway?” he asked.

I went for a grain of truth. “My dad is one,” I said. “It’s what I always wanted to do.”

“Must be in the blood,” Henry said. “Wouldn’t be many make detective at your age.”

“A few,” I said, figuring that was probably true. And anyway, even if people couldn’t be sure he was younger than me, Sam definitely looked pretty young.

“You got that address, Sir?” asked Sam.

“Oh, yeah.”

I glared up at Sam. I was developing a rapport with the witness. I didn’t need him cutting in on that. He wasn’t looking at me, though. He was arms crossed, waiting for Henry to get on with it and give us that address. I guess that was all we needed. He hadn’t known much about Amanda, really.

“The Gordons are at 129 Mason. Sort of behind Amanda’s place.”

“Well, thankyou,” I said.

“You got a card, Detective?” he asked. “In case I think of anything else?”

I reached into my pocket, but Sam beat me to it, his arm stretching out in front of me as he held a card out to my witness. Henry took it, with little enthusiasm, though he’d been so helpful before. He probably found Sam’s height intimidating. Dean said I had the kind of face people wanted to talk to, and I often found friendly worked where the guys’ stern, serious cop demeanours failed.

I thanked Henry again and Sam ushered me away from the fence and onto the sidewalk. I heard the garden hose going back on as we retreated.

“So, you didn’t find out anything?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing useful. She was such a nice girl, it’s a tragedy, it’s a shock, who’d have thought, this is a nice neighbourhood. All the stuff people usually say, whatever they really think. What about you? Apart from this friend.”

“Well, a couple of people mentioned her. Elizabeth Gordon. She’s a keen gardener and her husband is an accountant. The guy at number 13 thought Amanda might have been kind of unstable, and he wasn’t surprised. He also thought she was friends with a blonde lady. I don’t think this Liz Gordon is the blonde. Um…” I thought back over the other interviews. There’d been several people who were very forthcoming. “There was a really nice guy walking his dog who lives just across and he said there’s been a white car at Amanda’s a lot of nights until pretty recently.”

“That’d be Paul Dutton,” Sam said, confidently.

“I thought so. The brothers living at number 11 talked to me for ages, and they said she went out a lot in the evenings and she told them she was in a book club. They thought Liz was probably in the club. Maybe a lady called Tammi, too. Might be the blonde, but I didn’t ask cos I didn’t hear that part til after. The father from the house before that said Amanda was nice. And his son said she was crazy.”

“Did you interview any women?” Sam asked, as he strode alongside me.

I shrugged. “Couple. Why?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Hey, there’s Dean.”

We found Dean leaning on his car to wait for us. He stretched out as we arrived.

“So, Amanda hangs out with a lady called Liz,” he announced, meeting us. “That’s all anyone knows.”

“129 Mason,” I said. “That guy over there gave me the address.”

“Yeah,” said Sam. “He was very helpful.”

“I think he was bored,” I suggested. “He seemed to just enjoy talking. Anyway, he said Mason is basically behind Amanda’s. So if we take that little laneway we saw, I think we’ll get there quicker than driving.”

We were parked outside Amanda’s house, and a leafy lane ran between her house and the nearest neighbour. I peeked at it and started to head down. I heard the boys following behind me, their long strides catching up to me quickly.

In ninety seconds, we’d emerged all together, out onto Mason Street. The sign was right in front of us, and across the street, there was a nice sized house, with a white letterbox. Neat gold numbers designated it 129.

As luck would have it, there was a woman right outside. She had dark hair and a pretty face that looked a little worn. She was on her knees, digging over the earth in her garden with a small trowel.

Getting closer, I recognised a few of the plants. That was definitely belladonna, and that was mandrake. Pretty interesting choice of garden herbs for a suburban accountant’s wife.

“You must have a green thumb,” Sam said, as we walked up the driveway.

“Excuse me?” She looked up, taking the three of us in.

There was Dean, super hot in a black suit that didn’t look as cheap as it was. There was Sam, his godawful brown suit doing nothing to disguise his height or the breadth of his shoulders. Then there was me, pencil skirt and collared button-up, with sensibly-heeled boots that reached just under my knee. There was a limit to how flat I could make my hair, a clean-shaven Sam could easily pass for nineteen and Dean managed to look halfway between sexy and threatening at all times. God knows what would go through a person’s head on seeing us approach them.

“Getting these herbs to grow out of season like this, quite impressive.” Sam’s smile was so disarming, I was often surprised women didn’t just confess all at the sight of him. “I’m sorry, I shouldn have introduced myself first.”

He took out his badge, and Dean and I did the same.

“I’m Detective Bachman. My colleagues, Detectives Turner and Prince.” Detective Diana Prince was one of my favourite aliases. Sam and Dean liked their rock names. I preferred female superheros. Wonder Woman’s my main girl!

“We’re following up on Amanda Burns’ death, going around the neighbourhood and talking to neighbours and stuff like that,” I said.

Elizabeth, assuming that’s who she was, looked surprised. “But didn’t she... I mean she killed herself, right?”

There’s plenty of explanations for that. Guilt and genuine surprise made equal sense.

“Maybe, maybe…” said Sam.

“We heard you were friends with the deceased, right?” asked Dean.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Elizabeth replied.

 _I guess so_? That was an interesting answer, given that people all over the neighbourhood had reported that Amanda and Elizabeth were tight. I had heard it from multiple sources, and Dean had been told that by at least one person too. If someone asked if I were friends with Dean, I wouldn’t say “I guess so”. Unless I wanted to make out like I didn’t know him that well.

“Did you know about her practices?” I asked. Practices… good cop word. Much better than asking if she knew about the weird, gross witch shit her friend was into.

“I’m sorry, what kind of practices?” She might have been acting, or she might have been genuinely confused. Hard to tell.

“Well, see, her house was littered with Satanic paraphernalia,” said Sam. Satanic paraphernalia. Super official sounding. He was so verbose!

“A regular Black Sabbath,” said Dean and I almost smiled, because the statement was as _Dean_ as Sam’s had been _Sam_.

Elizabeth’s response was horror. Her brows narrowed a little and she moved back in shock. “No the… but she was an Episcopalian!”

“Well, then we’re pretty sure she was using the wrong Bible,” said Dean, with a little chuckle.

Elizabeth did not find this amusing, and just looked between the three of us in silence. I believed her surprise was genuine, but whether it was because she didn’t know the shit Amanda was into, or because she was surprised that we knew, I couldn’t say.

“Elizabeth? You alright?”

There were two new women behind us. One was blonde, just as one of Amanda’s neighbours had described. Although… a lot of women are blonde. The two women came up the driveway, moving around us to stand with Elizabeth.

“I’m fine. Uh… Renee. These are detectives. They say Amanda was… she was practicing…”

Renee gave her friend a kind sort of smile, but it didn’t extend to her eyes. I went to school with girls who smiled like that. They’d give a kind looking smile while they told you they’d heard your boyfriend was seen with someone else. Like they cared, when in their eyes, you could see they were celebrating your shame.

“I’m sorry, Detectives. You can tell that Elizabeth is a little bit upset.”

I must have been hanging with the guys too long, because I could tell just from the slight shift in Dean’s stance that he had taken the same instant dislike to Renee that I had. “Of course, Miss…”

“Mrs,” she said, still with her false smile. “Renee. Van. Allen.” Each name was spoken clearly and deliberately. Maybe she assumed we’d have heard of her. Perhaps she was a big deal, locally. “Would you like me to spell it for you?”

Dean was trying to hold back either vomit or laughter. “I’ll get by. Thanks.”

“This Amanda business has been hard for Liz,” Renee said. “For all of us.”

“Yeah.” The other woman finally spoke. I’d been starting to wonder if she was mute. “I mean… you think you know a person.”

“Well, I’m sure you probably have secrets too,” I said, probably with a smile as false as Mrs Renee Van Allen’s. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Well, thanks,” Sam said, glancing between Dean and I. “Um… we’ll be in touch.”

“Have a nice day,” Dean said. It’s not really an appropriate thing to say to three women who’ve just lost a friend. But Mrs Renee Van Allen didn’t seem as upset as she claimed to be. She seemed like someone who didn’t know how to be upset.

“Bye,” said the other, unnamed woman. Perhaps she was the “Tammi” that one of my witnesses had said Amanda knew.

Whoever she was, I could feel her eyes, and those of her friends, on my back as we walked down the driveway, and back towards the lane.

 

* * *

 

 

It was getting late, and our motel was a fair distance from the snotty neighbourhood we’d been canvassing. We decided to get some dinner in the area and then drive back to town and our motel. While we ate, Sam and I both used our phones to google Elizabeth and her friend Mrs Van Allen. We discussed our findings in the car on the way back, explaining what we’d found out to Dean.

“Well, I’m already sold on that Elizabeth chick,” said Dean. “Did you see that victory garden of hers? Belladonna, wolfsbane, mandrake? Not to mention that little flinch she threw when we mentioned the occult.”

“Well, she’s definitely had a good run lately,” Sam said, looking at his phone. “Gone up a few tax brackets, won almost too many raffles.”

“Well, black magic will help with that,” I said, leaning forward to poke my head between the two of them in the front.

“Tell him about _Mrs Renee Van Allen_ ,” Sam urged, imitating the posh, almost aggressive way she’d said her name.

“Well, she’s won basically every craft contest in town over the last three months,” I said.

“A regular Martha Stewart, huh?” Dean asked. “Except for the devil worship. I’m thinking that was the coven we met back there? Minus one member.”

“Amanda was clearly going off the reservation,” Sam said. “What do you think, they killed her to keep up appearances?”

I nodded agreement. “They seem like the kind of assholes that care about appearances.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “So… if they killed the nut job... . should we… uh… thank them? Or what?”

“They’re working black magic too, Dean,” Sam reminded him. “They need to be stopped.”

“Like…” I hesitated. “ _Stopped_ stopped?”

Sam’s only response was to look at me like the answer was obvious. But Dean saw what I meant.

“They’re human, Sam,” he said.

“They’re murderers,” Sam reminded us both.

I still wasn’t sure about killing humans, even if they were witches. I still felt kind of bad about Heather, the witch who’d made me invisible back in North Carolina. She was hurting people, and she was clearly nuts, but she was still a human being, and her father had loved her and cared about her.

Dean shrugged. “Burn witch burn.”

Outvoted then. Maybe they were right. I didn’t exactly have an alternative suggestion for dealing with them. I’d looked for ways to take a witch’s power without killing them, but I hadn’t actually found any answers. Perhaps killing them was the right thing to do. Though… as far as we knew, they’d only killed Amanda, because she’d killed other people. So, maybe they were just going to stick to winning craft contests and raffles in future?

I was about to say this, when there was a weird sound from the engine. The Impala was spluttering all of a sudden, like the engine was clogged up.

“What the hell?” asked Dean. He kept the car tuned up. It shouldn’t just break down without warning. But we were definitely slowing.

I leant further forward, to see if I could get a look at the dash. The headlights started to flicker, but I was pretty sure I saw a figure through the windshield. As we slowed to a total stop, Dean swore.

But there was someone in the road in front of us, and she was familiar. As the car stopped before her, and the lights shone on her, I realised I did know her. Sam got straight out of the car, and I nodded to Dean.

“That’s Ruby. Demon Ruby.”

“Shit, it is,” said Dean. He looked over his shoulder at me. “What the hell is this?”

I shrugged and scrambled to get out of the car. Dean was out a little before me, but I finally managed to make it onto the road. Ruby was talking to Sam.

“You have to get out of town,” she said.

“So… last time we met, I was missing a few details,” Dean said. Dean hadn’t realised what Ruby was the last time he’d met her. Not until Sam explained it. There had barely been time until then.

I realised Dean had the Colt. He cocked it, aiming it at Ruby’s head.

“Dean!” Sam called.

“I was hoping you’d show up again,” said his brother.

Ruby looked more scornful than anything. That seemed to be her default expression. It had certainly been the primary look on her face the other time I’d met her.

“Point that thing somewhere else,” she said.

Dean laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Right.”

I didn’t know what to do. Sam clearly trusted Ruby, at least enough not to shoot her. She’d helped him twice before and he’d spoken to her several times. But… I kind of had to agree with Dean. She was a demon. And we killed demons. That was kind of our whole deal.

“Sam, please,” she warned. “Go. Get in the car and don’t look back.”

“Why?” he asked her. “I don’t understand.

Dean rolled his eyes. “Hey, hot stuff, we can take care of a few kitchen witches, thanks.”

Ruby didn’t appear to give any kind of crap that Dean still had the Colt pointed at her. I wasn’t sure about it myself. I didn’t trust Ruby, but wasn’t she possessing someone? But then, she had been for months. Maybe they were already nearly dead.

“I’m not talking about witches, you jackass. Witches are whores. I’m talking about who they serve.”

I looked from Sam to Dean to Ruby. Dean wasn’t shooting, but he still had the Colt ready, and Sam looked like he was starting move between the demon and the barrel of his brother’s gun.

“Demons,” Sam said. “They get their power from demons.”

Okay, so demons. We could handle demons. We had the Colt, and all three of us could handle an exorcism alone, let alone in a group. No big deal. Ruby was probably just trying to scare us, for some agenda of her own.

“Yeah,” she said. “And there’s one here now.”

“Besides you?” I asked.

She ignored me. “Sam… it knows you’re in town and it’s gonna come after you and it’s way more than you can handle.”

Who did she think she was? She didn’t know what Sam, or any of us, could handle! And anyway, she was a _demon_! Why would we listen to her anyway? For all we knew, she was the one giving our witches their power, and she knew we _could_ handle it, which was why she was trying to scare us away.

“Seriously?” I asked, grabbing at his arm. “Sam, no!”

“What is this?” asked Dean. “Please tell me you’re not listening to this crap!”

“Put a leash on your brother, Sam,” said Ruby. “If you want to keep him.”

Sam wrenched his arm out of my grip. “Dean, look… just chill out.”

“No!” Dean insisted. “No! She’s messing with your head. God knows why, that’s who they are!”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Ruby said.

Dean was getting more agitated and I didn’t blame him. “And I’m telling you to shut up, bitch.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Why are you even a part of this conversation?!”

“Oh… I don’t know. Maybe because he’s my brother, you black eyed skank!”

My eyes widened. Wow. Harsh words, even for Dean.

“Oh, right, right. You care about your brother so much,” Ruby mocked. “That’s why you’re checking out in a few months, leaving him all alone?”

I couldn’t stop myself letting out a horrified gasp. She had nailed exactly what bothered me so much about Dean’s demon deal. I’d never told him as much, but secretly, deep down, I felt like it hadn’t really been for Sam’s sake at all. Like… maybe, as much as he thought he was doing it for his brother… Dean was really doing it because he couldn’t bear to be without him.

But like hell I was gonna let some demon point that out!

“Hey! Shut up!” I hollered.

She gave me a look of such derision. “At least let me try and save him,” she said to Dean. “Since you won’t be here to do it anymore.”

Dean’s jaw tightened. “She said, Shut Up.”

Before I really knew what was going on, Dean was moving, Sam was yelling. Sam pushed at his brother’s gun arm, there was a bang as the Colt went off. And Ruby was gone. It was three of us standing in the road, Dean looking at Sam with an expression of absolute fury, and Sam’s jaw twitching, with that expression I could never quite read.

The drive back was totally silent. Dean drove, Sam looked out the window and I sat in the back, trying to think. Ruby was a demon, right? We couldn’t trust her. And there was something about Sam trusting her that really bothered me. I knew Sam had some doubts about whether it was really as simple as “Monsters Are Evil”. There was his friend… Madison the werewolf. There was his own struggle with the demon blood inside him. And Ruby _had_ been helpful in the past.

But… there was something about her I just didn’t trust.

 

* * *

 

 

The second I closed the motel room door after me, Dean was yelling.

“What the hell were you thinking?!”

“What?” Sam demanded. “What the hell was _I_ thinking?”

“She’s a demon, Sam!” his brother reminded him. “Period. All right? They want us dead. We want them dead.”

As they yelled at each other, I flopped down onto Sam’s bed, my leg sore and my heart in nervous indecision. How could I assert that all demons were definitely evil, and still believe that Sam, despite having some demon blood inside him, was still inherently good? Possibly he had more goodness in him than anyone else in the world.

“Oh, that’s funny,” he said. “I remember that demon chick in Ohio, Casey. You didn’t want her dead.”

“Yeah, well she wasn’t stringing me along like a fish on a hook!” Dean yelled.

“No one’s stringing me along! Look, I know it’s dangerous… that _she_ is dangerous. But like it or not, she’s useful.”

“No! We kill her before she kills us. Right, Ellie?”

Oh God. Both of them were looking at me, perched on the edge of Sam’s bed, a bundle of nervousness. I didn’t know. They both had good points. Dean was right that we couldn’t trust a demon, but Sam was right that she’d been useful.

Useful… sure, but… I didn’t like her. I didn’t trust her. And maybe it’s wrong to operate based solely on a feeling, but it was a _really_ bad feeling.

“Right,” I said, with a sigh.

And it was a moment before I could meet Sam's eyes, but when I did, I regretted it. Because in the set of his jaw, and the line of his mouth, and his eyes… especially his eyes… there was an expression of such sadness. And betrayal.


	61. Chapter 60: Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The coven attacks Dean, but Ellie is hurt by someone else, and she's forced to ask herself who she can really trust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since it's only been 8 hours since I posted it, make sure you've read Chapter 59: Taking Sides, before you read this one!  
> (Also, I hate myself for writing this chapter. Only not enough to not do it. But a lot...)

Apparently Sam couldn’t look at my traitorous face any more than I could look at him. He turned his attention back to Dean. “Kill her with what?” he asked. “The gun she fixed for us?”

“Whatever works,” Dean said.

“If she wants us dead, all she has to do is stop saving our lives,” Sam observed.

I couldn’t help thinking, as Dean threw up his hands in exasperation and went to the basin, that Sam again had a point. Maybe I’d made the wrong call. But I could never take it back. I had said it. It was only one word, but it was loaded with meaning. I hadn’t just agreed with Dean that we should kill Ruby. I’d told Sam I didn’t trust his judgement. I didn’t trust demons. And I didn’t think there was any chance a demon could have good intentions. Demons were, without exception, evil.

But I hadn’t meant that. I hadn’t meant Sam and the blood that had been forced inside him. I just meant Ruby. I didn’t trust Ruby.

“Look, we have to start looking at the big picture,” Sam said, with a sigh. He was frustrated, but he was no longer angry. “Start thinking in strategies and… and moves ahead.”

Though Dean was busying himself at the basin, splashing his face with the cold water, I could see that he was still incredibly tense. His shoulders were tight.

“It’s not so simple,” Sam went on. “We’re not… we’re not just hunting anymore. We’re at war.”

Dean wasn’t about to yell anymore either. He just looked at Sam as he grabbed the towel and dried off.

“Are you feeling okay?” he asked, moving back towards his brother.

Sam sighed. He was standing close to me and looked like he was about to drop down onto the bed too, but he stopped. And he took a few steps across the room, to sit on Dean’s bed instead. He hated me. Couldn’t even bear to sit beside me.

“Why do you both keep asking that?”

“Because you’re taking advice from a demon for starters,” Dean said, following him across the room. “And, by the way, you seem less and less worried about offing people. You know, it used to eat you up inside.”

It was true. I didn’t want it to be true, but Dean was right. It was.

“Yeah,” asked Sam, his voice sounding so flat and defeated. “And what has that gotten me?”

“Nothing,” said Dean, as I began to wonder if I could get out of the room. This was getting very tense and kind of… brothery… Should I even be there?

Or maybe I really just wanted to get away from the feeling I had betrayed my best friend.

“But it’s just what you’re supposed to do, okay?” Dean went on. “We’re supposed to drive in the freakin’ car and freakin’ argue about this stuff. You know… you go on about the sanctity of life and all that crap.” He sighed with more irritation, and rubbed at his stomach. Yeah. I was feeling sick too.

“Wait, so… so you’re mad because I’m starting to agree with you?” Sam asked, looking as much confused as upset.

But I knew what Dean meant.

“He’s not mad. He’s worried,” I said. “Right, Dean?”

“Right,” Dean agreed. He sat down next to me on the bed. I kind of wished he hadn’t. I didn’t want it to look like it was me and Dean against Sam. It wasn’t like that. “I’m worried because you’re not acting like yourself.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” agreed Sam. “I’m not. I don’t have a choice.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Dean. He had quite a sheen of sweat on his neck, I noticed. It wasn’t water from just washing his face.

Sam sighed. “Look, Dean. You’re leaving. Right? And I gotta stay here in this craphole of a world. And… Maybe someone’s gotta be the guy that doesn’t worry so much about morality. Who’s gonna be that guy? Ellie?”

Dean shook his head, sucking in a little breath and clutching at his stomach. I wasn’t sure he was entirely listening.

I could maybe be that guy… Couldn’t I? I could try and be ruthless about killing what needed to be killed, and maybe ignoring those little grey areas. Possibly.

“I… I could be…”

Sam shook his head. “Not you. So, the way I see it, if I’m gonna make it, if we’re gonna fight this war after you’ve gone, then I gotta change.”

No. Oh God no. I could feel tears pricking behind my eyes. No! I couldn’t even entertain the idea of Sam being cynical and ruthless, killing first and asking questions later. I’d become that guy! I’d be that way if I had to. If that’s what it took to keep Sam from changing.

“Change into what?” asked Dean, still gripping at his stomach. Was he okay?

“Into you,” Sam said, shattering my heart. I loved Dean. I did. But I loved Sam too, for what he was. Just as he was. “I gotta be more like you.”

As Dean began to shake his head, expressing the disagreement I felt too, he suddenly stopped. His face contorted and he leaned further forward, gripping tighter onto his stomach.

“Ow…” he said, which for Dean was the equivalent of screaming out in agony.

I got my arm around and onto his back, bending forward to look at his face. “Hey… Dean, are you okay?”

He gasped out. “Ah… something’s wrong, Ellie! Like a bunch of knives inside of me…”

“Dean!” called Sam, immediately concerned, their argument forgotten.

I got down onto the ground so I could look up into Dean’s face.

“Son of a bitch…” he muttered, leaning forward. He was doubled over with the pain, assuming the airline crash position, almost.

“The coven,” Sam said. “It’s the coven.”

There was a hex bag somewhere. Had to be. I leapt up and went to the other bed, ripping off the blankets and sheets. Sam rushed to the cupboards, and I could hear him moving things and clattering, as I grabbed the knife from my pocket. Slicing open the mattress, I felt inside, but though I reached as far as I could, there didn’t seem to be anything that shouldn’t be there.

It had to be somewhere in the room, close to Dean. I grabbed each of the pillows in turn, and the sound  of Dean’s coughing spurred me to move faster. But I found nothing. Slicing open the other mattress, I put my arm inside as far as it would go and felt around. I’d already checked every pillow, even the ones sitting against my bedroll.

Looking around, I noticed Dean’s bag sitting by his bed. I picked it up and turned it over, throwing the contents all over the floor, but nothing that looked like a hex bag came out.

As I was rummaging through the stuff, I heard Dean speak, weakly. “Sam… What are you doing?”

I turned around, to see Sam had the Colt in his hand. He was closing the chamber, and moving towards the door. Meanwhile, Dean was bent double on the floor, blood around his mouth and on the carpet in front of him where he’d coughed it up.

“Sam!” I called out. “Jesus… Sam!”

But he was out the door and slamming it behind him. I couldn’t leave Dean. I couldn’t follow. Even if I wanted to leave Dean alone and dying, I’d never be able to get to the car on my sore leg before Sam got in and drove off. Besides, I knew what he was planning to do and I didn’t really see how I could stop him, except with reasoned arguments. And I didn’t have any.

What could I do but focus on helping Dean? I looked around the room in desperation. Between us, Sam and I had completely turned the place over. I’d cut up both mattresses, checked every pillow. All the cupboards were empty, including in the bathroom. Every one of our bags had been ransacked.

I felt a tight grip on my shoulders and turned back to Dean. He was clutching onto me as he hacked blood up onto the carpet in front of him.

I was good at first aid, but… there needed to be an injury.

“Okay, it’s okay,” I said, which I’m sure he knew was a massive lie. I let him grip me as hard as he needed to, while I got my hand around to rub his back.

He coughed blood onto me, but I barely noticed, as he let go of me to clutch onto his stomach again. What the hell were they doing to him? It was hard to believe I’d been wondering if it was right to kill these witches. This was such a horrific thing to do to a person. Dean was dying in agony and terror and there wasn’t anything I could do to help him. If killing them was the way to make it stop, then I was all for it.

“Ellie it… Ahhh!”

“Shh…” I said, trying to remember what Sam had done for me a week earlier, when I was getting stitches in my leg. That had been so painful. But he’d made it a little better. What did he do?

I took Dean’s hand, got beside him and kept my other hand rubbing up and down on his back. “Just squeeze if you need to, okay? Break my hand if you gotta. It’ll be okay. Sam will make them stop. And until he does, I’ll be here. I’ll stay here, Dean, I’m not gonna leave you okay?”

He gave the faintest of nods as his grip on my hand tightened.

“Just listen to my voice, honey,” I told him, trying to keep my tone as calm and soothing as possible. “It doesn’t even matter what I’m saying, just listen to the sound, yeah? And grip tighter if you want, this doesn’t even hurt. Don’t worry, I can take it. I’m super tough.”

His grip did tighten and it really did hurt my hand, but I easily tuned it out as he bent over and hacked again, a large spray of blood bursting out of his mouth.

“It’s gonna be alright,” I promised, though I really had no idea if it would be. “You’re gonna get through it. You’re a total badass, right? Everyone knows that. Just breathe, and break my hand and it’ll be over as soon as it can be.”

There was a loud bang, and I gripped Dean’s hand back as my muscles tightened with the shock. We both looked up to see the door had been kicked open. It was the last thing we needed. It was Ruby.

“You wanna kill me?” Dean gasped. “Get in line, bitch.”

She ignored him and came towards us. She tried to grab Dean, but I kept hold of him. Wasn’t it enough that he was having his insides mangled by witches? Couldn’t she just leave him to die?

“Let me help him, you stupid girl.”

As if she was there to help! Even if she really meant Sam no harm, she definitely didn’t like Dean. And he’d tried to kill her less than half an hour earlier.

“Leave him alone!” I hissed. She was standing over us both, but to fight her I was going to have to let go of Dean.

All I had on me was my knife, but that would have to do. I gave Dean a slight pat as I got up to my feet, knife at the ready.

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Seriously?” And then she said something. A word, in a language I couldn’t recognise. And then… pain.

I flew backwards but I barely noticed as the stitches on my leg popped all at the same time. It was like that wendigo was slicing me up all over again. I screamed from the pain of it as I hit the floor. I hadn’t been thrown hard or far, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the pain of my leg as everything went black, just for a moment.

It was like I passed out, but only for a second. When I came too, blood gushing from my leg, Ruby had picked Dean up and hauled him onto a bed. He struggled against her, kicking and punching, but he was weak from whatever the coven was doing to him. I had to get to him!

I tried to stand, but there was no way my leg was going to take the weight. But I could crawl over there with two arms and one good leg. It was only a few steps. Trying to shut out the pain, I used the strength in my arms to get myself moving.

As Ruby forced Dean’s mouth open, I inched slowly closer to her. Without even looking at me, she muttered that same word again and gestured vaguely in my direction. And then the second line of stitches popped. The internal ones that were supposed to knit my muscle back together. I collapsed immediately, just as I had back on that mountain when the wendigo claw had ripped through my leg.

I couldn’t see anything but black spots swimming in front of my eyes and I couldn’t hear properly. Everything was muddy and dark and there was the sound of my own heart pumping furiously.

But then, I realised Dean was sitting upright. He wasn’t coughing. He wasn’t doubled over with pain. He was sitting at the edge of the bed. I thought he was saying something and so was Ruby maybe. But I couldn’t really understand them. They were so blurry.

“Ellie!” Dean was calling to me, and rushing over.

He picked me up super easy, like he was just lifting a pillow. Then he was placing me gently on the bed, and I felt his hand clutch at my leg. He must have seen the blood seeping through my jeans.

“What the hell did you do to her?”

Ruby’s voice sounded sort of… bored?

“Why should you care? She tried to stop me saving your life.”

There were more dots and I was fading out again, but I was pretty sure I heard Dean say a succession of really offensive words. I couldn’t really make out what was going on around me, or how much time was passing. There wasn’t really anything but pain, and occasionally Dean’s rough hand on my cheek or… my leg? He must have cut away my jeans...

Then there was agony, as he did something to my leg. Why was Dean hurting me?! Because I’d tried to stop Ruby? But I didn’t know. I thought she was going to kill him, same as he did, and I was just trying to help. I screamed and cried with the pain and I didn’t know how long it went on. Maybe an hour? Maybe just a minute?

After, Dean’s hand was back on my forehead, brushing back my hair. His other hand was holding onto mine, just like before, only this time, I was the one in pain. His rough, calloused hands were real gentle and I realised he hadn’t been trying to hurt me at all. He must have been doing something to help.

“I’ve stopped the bleeding,” he said, close to my ear. “I gotta help Sam, okay? Don’t try to move. I’ll be back. I’ll bring Sam back. I promise. Okay, sweetheart?”

“Okay,” I said, and my voice couldn’t get any louder than a whisper.

I felt his hand on my cheek and his lips on my forehead before he was gone and I was left all alone. Dean said I wasn’t supposed to move and I didn’t think I had the energy anyway. I didn’t even have the strength to wipe at my tears as I felt them falling sideways down my cheeks. I couldn’t lift my arms.

He was going to bring Sam back? I needed him. I needed Sam. I’d hurt him, but all I had to do was explain what I meant. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t his blood. It was Ruby. I said I didn’t trust her and I was right. Sam would understand that, wouldn’t he? He’d forgive me. He always forgave people, and I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.

And I was right. He’d have to see that. Maybe Ruby did save Dean’s life and maybe she wasn’t working with that coven, but why did she hurt me like this? She didn’t have to hurt me so bad. I was trying to save Dean, but if she could slice through my stitches without touching me, then why couldn’t she just hold me back or pin me to a wall or something? Why did she have to hurt me so much?

Dean said he stopped the bleeding, but I still had those black dots and the sounds outside the room sounded weird and subdued. It was like when you’re swimming underwater and you hear sounds on the surface. Probably I’d already lost a lot of blood.

What if Dean never came back? What if he couldn’t help Sam, or those witches killed them both? Would I just have to lie there and bleed out? How long could Dean’s makeshift bandaging hold? What if Dean came back but without Sam. What if Sam died before I could explain that I loved him and trusted him no matter what?

 

* * *

 

 

“Hey… Hey Pea…”

I was still in the motel room, flat on my back on a mess of a bed. I remembered that I had ripped all the sheets and blankets off and slit the mattress, trying to find the hex bag affecting Dean.

But now, Sam was sitting on the bed beside me. He had nudged me awake with his big gentle hands and was looking down at me, the sweet little crinkle between his sad supernova eyes.

“What happened?” I asked, trying to sit up. There was a shooting pain in my leg and I remembered. “Ruby...”

“I’m so sorry, Ellie. No… don’t move. Dean!”

In a few moments, Dean was on my other side, and both of them were holding onto me, to keep me flat against the mattress.

“You brought him…” I whispered.

Dean grinned. “I told ya, Princess. Now just lie there a second. Ruby gave us this… what is it?”

Sam held a bottle in front of my face. There was some kind of brown liquid inside. It looked like thick, gluggy gravy.

“Ruby made this for you,” Sam said. “She says it can heal your leg. But it’s gonna hurt when we…”

I was upright so quick, I didn’t even notice the pain it caused me until I was done and straining against Sam and Dean’s arms. Ruby wanted them to put something in my wound! Some horrible gross brown demon witch potion thing. Like hell! Nothing Ruby made was going anywhere _near me_.

“Ellie…” Sam started, helping keep me upright as I started to get dizzy. There were those black dots again! My old friends. “It’ll hurt, but it’ll cure you. Knit everything back to…”

“No! No!” I hollered, looking to Dean, who was still on my other side, both hands gripping tightly onto my upper arm. “Dean, don’t let him!”

Dean shrugged and looked at his brother. “Guess I better take her to the ER…”

But Sam still had the bottle and he opened it. He put it just under my face to show me. “Look,” he said. “It’s nothing bad. It’s like the stuff she gave Dean.”

I shook my head. I didn’t care if that stuff had cured Dean. I didn’t care if Ruby had saved Dean’s life. I didn’t like her, I didn’t trust her and she’d split my leg back open on purpose. She didn’t have to do that. I was a reasonable person. She could have talked to me, tried to convince me.

She was a demon. She must have had lots of ways to get me out of the way. Instead, she cut me back open. She hated me. She hurt me on purpose, because she could, and I didn’t care what was in the bottle. I didn’t care if it was a miracle potion. It could fix my leg, or wipe away all my scars or turn me into a six-foot busty Amazonian Goddess. I didn’t care. I was not letting anything Ruby made touch me. I didn’t want her help.

Sam turned his damn puppy eyes on me. I knew he really believed it would help me. I might have betrayed him by siding with his brother, but I could never believe Sam would knowingly do anything that might hurt me. He wouldn’t even say harsh words to me.

But he wasn’t me, and he hadn’t just had his leg torn open by that demon bitch.

“Please, Ellie. It won’t hurt you.”

I looked back to Dean. “Please take me to hospital.”

But Sam was still determined. “Ellie…”

“She said no, Sam!” Dean snapped at him. One arm went underneath my knees and his other went around my back. “Don’t even think about trying to walk, sweetheart.”

I wasn’t going to try. It hurt too much. He lifted me off the bed and I rested my head against his chest and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the pain. But it was hard to forget. It was going to get worse, I’d have to have the stitches again and it had taken so long last time. I’d thought I was going to die with every single one.

But at least Sam had held my hand.

“Open the door,” barked Dean, and next thing I could really feel was the cold air on my face and my exposed leg. There was a slight sting, but I didn’t even notice it beneath the constant, throbbing agony.

 

* * *

 

 

Sam didn’t come to the ER. I didn’t know if he didn’t want to, or Dean wouldn’t let him or what. It didn’t matter. I wanted him there so much, but at the same time, I didn’t. I wanted Sam there to help me, but I wanted _my_ Sam. Not the hard edged, pragmatic guy he thought he needed to become. Would that guy even hold my hand? Or would he just tell the doctor to patch me up quick so we could get back to war?

Maybe he was right, but I didn’t want him to be.

While we waited for a doctor, Dean told me what had happened. In between the waves of pain, he explained he’d got there to find one of the witches, Tammi, the dark-haired one, was possessed by a demon. She was about to kill Sam, but Ruby had stopped her. Both the other ladies got killed. There was a thing where Ruby told the other demon she was coming back to the fold or something, but it was just a ruse to get closer. It didn’t work, but Dean had managed to get the knife and kill the demon-witch.

Then Ruby had made sure Sam was okay, given him the stuff for my leg and told him maybe he should listen next time she warned him. I didn’t want to hear what Ruby had to say, whether she’d saved them or not. When I told Dean that, he just nodded and pointed out that I’d now lost two pairs of jeans. But he promised to take me shopping, so he must have felt _really_ sorry for me. The only other time he’d ever taken me shopping was when I needed a bikini.

Dean held my hand through the stitches and I cried the whole time. Maybe because it hurt so much. Or maybe because my best friend said we had to trust the demon who’d done the damage. Even after she hurt me.

They gave me really strong painkillers so I fell asleep in the car on the way back to the motel.

I dreamed about my mother, with those shiny black demon eyes like the day she died. I dreamed about Ruby, cutting into my leg with something real sharp. And Sam… watching and telling me it was for the best, and it would be okay and not to worry and to just trust him.

And then I dreamed his eyes were black too.


	62. Chapter 61: Bottle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie talks herself into trusting her friend again. But she still has to wait for her leg to heal back up. Or... she could use the potion in Ruby's bottle...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter is set just after 3x09 and takes in the beginning of 3x10: Dream A Little Dream Of Me

I woke up in pain. All sweaty and confused, every breath was shallow as I knew nothing but the agony. For a moment I didn’t know where I was or even who I was. I cried out and reached down for my leg, as though I could brush the pain away or make it better somehow.

After the initial disorientation, and as the wave of mindless stabbing torture passed, replaced by mere extreme pain, I realised what was happening. I was in the back seat of the Impala. We were moving. It was dark out, and my leg hurt because Ruby had ripped the stitches open.

Dean was driving and Sam was riding shotgun like usual. He turned around, looking back at me. He was brow-crinkled, sad-eyed, quivering-lipped concern. How could I not trust him?

“Is the pain too much?” he asked.

I nodded. I could kind of form a full thought in my head. My leg hurt a lot and quite suddenly. “Hurts…” I muttered.

He looked at his watch. “You can’t have more painkillers for another half hour. Do you want us to stop and help you get more comfortable?”

Half an hour of pain? That sounded like a super long time. But then I remembered that time we’d driven for an hour while Dean had a bullet in him.

“No. I’m okay. Where we going?”

“After three dead chicks and the way we trashed up that motel room, we figured we better get out fast. Sammy packed us up while we were at the ER,” Dean said, looking back at me for a moment.

“Oh,” was all I said.

“We can stop whenever you want,” said Sam, still looking over at me. “Next town, or roadside. Whatever you need.”

He turned around and reached down for something. It was a bottle of water. He waved it invitingly. “You want a drink?”

I nodded, still fairly weakly. It was hard to really focus through the pain and properly take in what he was saying. He unscrewed the cap so it snapped away from the ring and then screwed it back on more loosely. He handed it over to me and then pulled his hand back pretty quick. Maybe. Or was I just imagining it?

I got the cap off the bottle by myself, as I breathed in and out nice and even. Focusing on breathing always helped with pain. I spilled a few drops of water, but mostly I got it down. I only had enough energy to take a couple of sips and then I screwed the cap back on. I fumbled it a little, but got it.

I put it down beside me and looked down at my leg. My jeans had been cut above the knee, just on the injured leg. Below, a wide bandage was covering the long gash, from just below the knee down to the shin. No blood was on it, and I remembered the doctor had put a waterproof dressing over the new stitches and then the bandage over that.

We had to tell him I’d been doing yoga and that’s why the stitches popped. He’d been so patronising about it, warning me to be more sensible next time. So unfair.

I put my head back and closed my eyes. I probably wouldn’t go to sleep again without another painkiller, but I could try and tune out the pain and just think about nothing but breathing.

In… Out… In… Out… In… Had Sam kept that bottle Ruby gave him? What was in it? And why would he trust her anyway? After what she did to me?

Out… In… Out… In... Okay, but Ruby really did save Dean’s life, despite what she’d done to me in the process. Maybe she’d hurt me, but whatever she was up to, she wanted Sam to be on her side, obviously. Which meant that whatever she gave to Sam, it was probably legitimate? Right?

In… Out… In… And anyway, don’t I keep thinking that what I love so much about Sam is his trusting nature and his willingness to have faith that even monsters can change? How can I say that and then be mad at him for trusting Ruby?

Out… In… How could I do it? How could I dream that? Sam had never done anything but love me and care about me and I told him the demon blood inside him changed nothing! I promised him it wouldn’t make me love him or trust him any less.

Out…  It was Ruby I couldn’t trust. Ruby. Not Sam. I would always trust Sam.

But Sam trusted Ruby.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Dean was just driving randomly, to get us away from the scenes of our various crimes. We drove hours, and I even got a little sleep, once I could take something for the pain. By morning, we were well into Vermont and all exhausted. We pulled into a roadside motel in a crappy little town and Sam checked us in.

The painkillers I got from the hospital were different than the last kind I had. I didn’t want to get strung out and embarrass myself with 90s pop songs again. I still hadn’t retrieved the footage of me from Dean’s phone. These drugs weren’t quite as effective, but that was okay. I could live with a little pain if I kept my mind with it.

It was Dean that helped me into the room. Maybe he wanted to help, or maybe Sam didn’t, but I noticed, because normally it was Sam hovering by me and making sure I had everything I wanted. I hoped it was just Dean feeling extra sorry for me, or maybe a little guilty because I’d been trying to protect him when Ruby split my leg back open. That scenario was better than Sam being wary of me, after what I’d said.

Sam did carry my stuff in and he took my duffle into the bathroom for me, so I could get changed as soon as Dean had got me safely inside. With a sigh, I tossed aside another ruined pair of jeans. Looked like I was spending another week in loose pyjamas.

When I was done, washed and dried and comfortable as I could get, I sat on the edge of the bath and called for Dean to come help me. But it was Sam who cautiously pushed the door open and peeped in.

“He passed right out,” said Sam. “Is it okay… Can I help?”

I nodded. Perhaps Sam didn’t think I wanted his help. I couldn’t remember that well, but I thought maybe I’d snapped at him, over that potion or cream or whatever Ruby had given him. But I’d been in pain and hurt that he trusted her. I hadn’t had time to think about it. I certainly hadn’t meant to hurt him. I was probably just cranky.

I smiled and held my arms out. “Of course you can.”

He opened the door up properly and came over. I reached up to put one arm around his neck, but I didn’t need to bother. He was so much bigger than me that he was able to sweep me up into his arms in one easy movement.

Dean was lying on one of the beds, above the blankets, face stuffed into the pillow, still fully dressed and slightly bloody. He was right next to the window and light was flooding in, but he obviously didn’t care.

The other bed had the covers already pulled back. Sam lowered me down so gently I barely even felt it as my butt hit the mattress. “You gonna sleep or you wanna sit up?” he asked.

“Sit up, please.”

He rearranged the pillows behind my back so I could sit up straight, my injured leg thrown out to the side where it would be safe from the rest of me. A wave of pain came over as I got settled, but it wasn’t too much for me to handle. I could have pulled up the blankets and settled myself, but Sam busied himself with such careful attention that it felt like maybe he wanted to do it for me. Like he needed to. He didn’t. I was the one in the wrong.

In a minute or so, I was all set, cosy and warm. I’d probably be camping out in that bed for a week like last time, so it was best to make myself comfortable. Start as you mean to go on or whatever.

“Sam…”

“I just gotta... “ he gestured towards the bathroom. “I’ll be right back, okay? I’ll bring your stuff.”

I was left to sit there alone, looking around at the decor (classic motel brown and beige) and maybe, for like thirty seconds, at Dean’s butt, tantalisingly outlined as he sprawled on the bed in extremely flattering jeans. That eased the pain...

Finally, the toilet flushed, and after a few moments, Sam came back out, bringing my bag.

“Okay… what do you need?” he asked, setting it down beside the bed. “You’ve got a book in here, right? And you’ve gotta charge your phone…”

“Sam,” I said, firmly this time. Then I patted the space on the bed beside me. “Sit with me for a bit.”

He looked down at me for a moment, hesitating. Maybe he wanted to give me a chance to explain myself. Or maybe he felt bad because of my leg. Whatever it was, he sat down and let his long legs stretch out along the length of the bed, beside mine. He didn’t look very comfortable, but whether that was his back against the hard wall, or his reticence about our conversation, I couldn’t say.

Might as well get straight to the point. I kept my voice down, to avoid waking Dean. “So… last night. When you and Dean were arguing about Ruby. And I agreed with him, that we couldn’t trust her…”

“Yeah?” he asked, just above a whisper.

“I… Just to be clear… I meant Ruby and only Ruby. I haven’t met every demon ever. I’m not saying it’s totally impossible that a demon could be good. We’ve seen that vampires can give up human blood. And werewolves don’t even know… So… I can buy that a demon could be on our side. And I know for sure that something could have a little demon in it, and still be good.” I looked over at Dean, reluctant to be more explicit, just in case. “Do you know what I mean?”

For a long time, Sam just stared at me. His eyes were fixed firmly on mine, and I just stared back, afraid to look away, in case he took that as a sign I was lying or not serious. Though the pain in my leg twinged a bit, I ignored it, determined to keep looking at him.

“You…” his eyes shifted down, to look at where my hand sat above the blankets, a mere centimetre or so between my fingers and his thigh. “I thought you meant…”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Dean said we should kill Ruby. And I agreed. That’s all I meant by it.” I reached my hand out and over to grab his out of his lap. “It’s her, Sam. I don’t trust _her_. And…” I even smiled a little, but not because I found anything funny about it. More to show Sam I wasn’t mad at him. “I was kinda right…”

“Ellie, I am _so sorry_ she hurt you. I think… Well, I do trust her. I think she’s telling the truth when she says she’s on my side. But, she’s still a demon, so I guess maybe... she doesn’t see it like I do. Maybe she thinks the end justifies the means.”

I frowned, loosening my touch on his hand a little. “But, she didn’t have to do this to me. There were other ways…”

As my grip loosened, his tightened, his big hand wrapping around mine. “I think she just does things quick, in the moment. It… it probably didn’t occur to her not to do it. She knew she could fix it after…”

I took my hand back from him, and if it hadn’t been for my leg I’d have got up altogether. How could he defend her? I was in so much pain and he didn’t care!

“Are you saying it’s okay she did this to me?” I hissed, trying not to raise my voice and wake Dean.

“No, no…” Sam said, eyes dark and sad as he looked at me. “Never. I just understand why _she_ thought it was. But I’ll tell her, okay? I’ll tell her it was wrong, and I’m not okay with it and she better not hurt you again.”

Without realising I was doing it I had folded my arms. I had a karate teacher who said that when people get defensive they cross their arms instinctively because it protects the upper body, where major organs are. Way back before we evolved, that’s one way we reacted to danger.

“How can you stop her?” I asked. My leg felt more painful than it had when the conversation started. Maybe the painkillers were wearing off?

Sam frowned and his forehead crinkle came back while he considered this. “I’ll make it a last warning. If she hurts you again, ever, I’m done with her. No matter what she says.”

I looked deep into his eyes, not so much supernova as a deep, dark brown. They really were like a dog’s. Or a bear, maybe.

“You promise?” I asked. “No more chances?”

“Ellie, if she so much as scratches you, I’ll kill her.”

He was serious. He had that hard edge to his voice, like when he talked to a demon or a witch or some vile thing we were hunting. I believed him completely.

“Promise?” I asked, mostly because the intensity in his eyes and his voice made me so uncomfortable I had to say something.

“I promise,” he said, his eyes softening again.

I wasn’t one hundred percent happy. I wanted Sam to say he was done trusting Ruby, and dealing with her. I wanted him to say he’d never trust somebody who would deliberately hurt me. Because that’s how I felt about him. If I could have had the world completely my own way, we wouldn’t even be having the conversation.

But then I felt bad, because if everything had been my way, Sam wouldn’t have trusted Ruby in the first place, and she wouldn’t have saved Dean. That was selfish of me. My leg wasn’t more important than Dean’s life.

And… that was kind of the point. She had hurt me while trying to save Dean. Sam knew that, so maybe under the circumstances what she’d done to me didn’t matter so much to him. I was sure Sam loved me and cared about me a whole lot. But Dean was his _brother_. Ruby had saved his brother. And she said she could save him from Hell too, help to break the contract.

Of course that mattered more to Sam than I did. It should.

“I’m sorry,” I said, leaning into him, I shifted sideways a little so I could get my other arm up to hug him. The stab of pain was worth it.

At first he seemed startled when I threw my arms around his middle and pulled myself into his torso. Then he relaxed, and one of his arms settled around my waist.

“I hope she can help you save Dean,” I whispered. “Really.”

“But what are you sorry for?” he asked. “You’re the one who needed new stitches.”

“I shouldn’t have expected you to just ditch her,” I admitted. “Not when she can help Dean and I can’t.”

Even though I was already squashing myself into him, his arm tightened around my waist and he pulled me in closer. “You’re trying,” he said, still keeping his voice low. “And she can help us save Dean without coming near you again, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

I felt his face brushing against my hair, but when I looked up, he was looking down at me. He opened his mouth, about to speak, but there was a sudden grunting from Dean.

His head snapped up instantly, looking over at us and squinting. “Wha’? You say something?”

I could hear Sam chuckling, as I shook my head.

“But you should get changed and go to sleep properly,” I told him.

“Huh?” he sat up, and then looked down, staring bleary eyed at his t-shirt and jeans. “Oh…”

I smiled and turned to Sam, as he started getting up off the bed. He would sleep on the floor with my bedroll again, no doubt.

“Aw…” said Sam. “He’s all tuckered out.”

I could almost _hear_ Dean scowl as he stomped into the bathroom.

 

* * *

 

Five days later we were still in the same motel room. I was almost back to the same state I was in before Ruby attacked me. Or defended herself. Or whatever it was.

The pain was getting better. If I didn’t use the leg, I didn’t need the painkillers. I could just about handle a trip to the toilet on it without pharmaceutical aid. Mostly stuck in bed, I read a lot of books. I watched a lot of daytime TV. Sam wasn’t around as much as he was the first time. He’d come and go, same as Dean. He never told me where he went. I asked a few times, but he just said he’d been “around”, which seemed a lot like evading the question. I figured he didn’t want to tell me. He was entitled to his private business.

Maybe he was meeting Ruby.

Speaking of Ruby… that jar was still there. Gross muddy brown liquid, sitting in its bottle, beside the TV. Just there. Neither of the boys ever mentioned it, or suggested I smother my leg with it. It was just sitting there.

It probably worked. Once my initial panic and hysteria had worn off and I regained the ability to reason clearly, I decided that Ruby was probably on the level when it came to the potion. I didn’t think she’d save Dean’s life, to earn Sam’s trust, and then throw that away again by giving them something that would hurt or poison me. It wouldn’t make any sense. If her whole plan was to kill me (a thought I had one morning, after a particularly nasty nightmare), she could have just done so that night. Ripping my stitches back out and then hoping I used a poisoned potion seemed a bit ridiculous as a plan.

And anyway, I was hardly important enough for anyone to bother engineering a complex plot to kill me. More likely Sam was right, and she’d ripped open those stitches because she needed to get me gone quick, and she knew she could fix it.

I could have used the potion. Sometimes, when the pain was particularly bad, or I was super bored and itching to get back to hunting, I would sit and stare at it. I’d wonder if it would prevent my leg from scarring too much. Would it heal me instantly, like when Dean was hexed? Or would I have to apply it a few times?

So there I’d be, sitting and staring at it, when the boys weren’t around, and thinking maybe it’d make my life simpler and better if I just used the stuff.

But I didn’t want her help.

I went looking online and through some of the books I’d scanned from Dad’s library. Maybe I could figure out what was in the thing, and we could make our own. Then I could use it, and I wouldn’t have to be taking anything from _her_. Plus we could make more. It’d be useful stuff to have.

But I never found any recipe. I couldn’t even figure out what the stuff _was_. So I was left to stare at it, willing myself to be less stubborn and bitchy and to just let go of my damn grudge. But I couldn’t.

She had done this to me, and I’d be damned if I’d take the help she had offered.

I was sitting in bed, my book beside me, as I stared at it. I’d been five days healing and was back to hobbling around the room again. I couldn’t really walk far, so I hadn’t been able to go anywhere, but Dean had taken me to the Biggerson’s drive-thru a few times. He’d even promised to maybe take me out to a bar for dinner that night. Between him and Sam I’d be able to hobble my way to a booth.

My Dad was working a case in Pennsylvania. I’d warned him off coming to meet us, saying it was way too far to come, just because I had a little cut on the leg. He said he could manage his thing alone, and it wasn’t worth us coming to help. But we talked about maybe meeting somewhere halfway after he wrapped things up. It would be awesome to see my Dad. I hadn’t been back home in nearly six months. He’d fuss when he saw my leg, but it would be worth it to see him.

It was just after two o’clock, and as I stared at my potion-bottle nemesis, I wondered if I should start getting ready soon. I’d need a shower and that took ages.

I was startled out of my thoughts (and my one-sided staring match) when my cell phone rang. Figuring it’d just be one of the boys, I reached across the bed lazily, grabbing the phone from the side table. It was an unknown number.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Elenore Singer?”

People didn’t often call me Elenore. Except my Dad, when he was angry. “Er… yeah?”

“Elenore, my name’s Sally, I’m at UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside. We’re a hospital in Pittsburgh…”

A hospital? Why would a nurse be calling me from a hospital in Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh…

Then I remembered where Pittsburgh was.

“Oh God… Is it my Dad?”

“I’m afraid he was admitted a few hours ago.”

No! I tried to remember what kind of case he’d been dealing with, but I didn’t think he’d actually told me. He just said it was a little thing, so I was thinking it must have been a simple salt and burn or something. Oh God… why wouldn’t he call me and tell me he was in hospital? What could be wrong?

I could hear the panic in my own voice. “What happened? What’s wrong with him?”

“Well, he’s stable for now, but he’s in a coma. A motel maid found him.”

All I heard was “coma”. That was bad! Real bad! I started to feel dizzy. I had to calm myself. Steady breathing, Ellie. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

“Coma? Is it… will he be okay?”

In through the nose… Out through the mouth… Be calm… This stuff is important, you need to hear it...

“Well, that’s hard to say. I can get a doctor to call and discuss the situation, or if you want to come here yourself and…”

“Yes!” I breathed. “Yes!!! I’ll come. I’m in Vermont. I can come soon. I’ll come.”

“Okay,” she said. “Look, we really don’t know what the situation is right now, so there’s no need to panic. Just make your way here, and you can discuss it with the doctors.”

“Is he gonna die?” I asked, looking around the room. I’d need to find shoes. Where did I put them last?

“You need to speak to a doctor, alright?” she said, in what was probably a specially trained calm voice.

But… She didn’t say no! “Al… alright…”

Dammit! Where the hell were my shoes?! I couldn’t waste time looking for them. Dad needed me!

“Alright,” she said. “We’ll call you again if there’s any change, okay.”

“Okay…”

I could feel the tiny prickly stabs of tears behind my eyes as she hung up. Then I just sat and stared at my phone for a while. Coma? But, didn’t she say something about a motel maid finding him? That didn’t sound like a case-related thing.

He was only 57! He had a pretty stressful life, but he was way fitter than he looked, and surely his heart wouldn’t just give out or anything? And she just said coma. She didn’t say anything about heart attacks or whatever.

Oh God! What if it was a brain tumour or something? Or like… an aneurysm. Couldn’t those just come out of nowhere?

“Dean…” I muttered to myself. “Need Dean…”

He had to take me to Pittsburgh. Luckily his number was in my recent calls list. I didn’t really have it together enough to look further than that.

He answered the phone with a groan. “He’s drinking whiskey at two in the afternoon!”

“What? Who is?”

“Sam! He’s drunk at… Ellie, are you crying?”

“Something’s wrong with Dad! He’s in some hospital in Pittsburgh or something and he’s in a coma and they didn’t say why and Dean come back please!”

“Hey, hey… Calm down, sweetheart. We’ll come back right away, okay?”

“Please hurry! I need to go there and I can’t even think straight and I don’t know what to do!”

I heard him talk to Sam. “She says Bobby’s sick. Yeah. Hurry up.” Then he was back to me again. “We’ll be right back, okay? Just calm down.”

He told me to calm down three more times before saying they were on their way and hanging up.

And there I was, alone in the room, trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next. My dad needed me and I didn’t know how to help and even if I was in Pittsburgh already, what could I even do?

I could barely even walk on my leg. I was useless as a hunter and useless as a daughter. How could I stay in a hospital room with him if I needed to elevate my leg all the time? I’d have to be doped up just to make the drive, let alone sit on one of those plastic hospital chairs all day. What if he had been attacked and it was something to do with the case? I couldn’t even find whatever had done it, let alone kill it, with half the muscles in my leg torn up.

Then I looked up and saw it.

The bottle.

I threw my phone down onto the bed beside me, reached down to my bare knee and started to undo my bandage...

 


	63. Chapter 62: All Night Long

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobby is asleep and won’t wake up. There doesn’t seem to be a medical reason. So Ellie looks for non-medical reasons. All night long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It turns out scared and emotional and determined Ellie is one of the easiest Ellies to write, so you get this new chapter comparatively quickly. <3

The boys were back within ten minutes. When they came in, I was on my feet, with my bag up on the bed. I was grabbing things from where I’d scattered them about the room, throwing them into the bag as I went from here to there in a mad panic. I didn’t even care about the slight twinge of pain from my leg.

“Dean, all your stuff is on your bed, Sam yours is on the table! I haven’t got the stuff in the bathroom yet, but I’m nearly ready, we just gotta get it into the car.”

They didn’t seem to say anything to each other, but I wasn’t looking at them. Dean just passed me and went into the bathroom. Then, as I crossed the room with a book to stuff into my bag, Sam stopped me. He had one hand on each shoulder.

“Ellie…”

“We gotta hurry, Sam!”

“I know, I know…” he said. “It’s… okay. Come on.”

He guided me back to the edge of my bed and pushed down on my shoulders so I sat. Then he lowered himself down next to me. There was alcohol on his breath, but I barely noticed it.

“What did they say?”

“Um… um… um…” I began to fidget, abandoning the book beside me, and picking at the loose thread on my tank top. “Um… He’s in a coma. She said… um… she said a maid found him. At a motel. And um… She said he’s stable but I don’t know what that means. What does that mean? He’s in a coma, Sam, how is that stable?”

He put his arm around my waist, and his hand came out the other side to take my own hand and stop me pulling at that loose thread.

“I think it means the coma isn’t getting worse,” he said. “He’s not in any immediate danger.”

“But… but… how is a coma not dangerous?! And I asked her if he was gonna die, and she said I have to see the doctors when I get there and she didn’t say no, she didn’t…”

I couldn’t stop myself crying again, even though Dean had come out of the bathroom. He stuffed something into his bag, and then came over to sit on my other side.

“Hey, we’re gonna get you there quick as we can, okay?”

He squeezed my shoulder for a moment, before getting up. He went to grab a pile of stuff next to the TV. As I rubbed at my eyes, I saw him look at Ruby’s bottle. It was empty. He picked it up and raised one eyebrow, then put it right back down again, scooping up my pack of cards and his whiskey bottle without a word.

Sam had seen it too. He looked down at my leg. I’d been wearing skirts all week, because they were a little longer and warmer than my shorts, but easier to get over the bandage than tight jeans. Now I was bare legged, a weird hairy rectangle covering a large portion of my right leg below the knee. I had been shaving around the dressing for five days. Now there was just a long deep scratch, with a few little holes where I’d cut my own stitches out. And the hair.

Then he looked back up at my face, but just like Dean, he said nothing about it. Instead, he just held me tighter and planted a soft, slightly boozy smelling kiss in my hair.

 

* * *

 

 

We made the trip in six hours. Dean drove without stopping. Sam sat beside him, mostly looking out the window and silently processing the alcohol in his system.

I wasn’t unconcerned that Sam had been drinking whiskey at two o’clock in the afternoon. That was really more Dean’s style, and I knew there was stuff eating Sam up that he probably was trying to drink away. I just didn’t know how to help him and I wasn’t together enough to think about it.

The whole ride, I just sat in the back, thinking about Dad. It had always been just him and me. Mom was such a distant memory, a kind voice and a nice smell and for some reason, cherry pies. My most vivid memory of her, of course, wasn’t even her.

All I really knew was Dad. When I was a little girl, I just followed him from room to room. If he was in the study, I was on the big rug, playing with my dolls and prattling away to myself while he read one of the strange big books that he got in the mail. When he went into the kitchen to make dinner, I’d skip along after him and bring a doll up to the big kitchen table. He’d give me things to mix in the bowl and when I got older, I was allowed to chop ingredients for him. When he was outside, stripping cars, I’d go out too, to that little drawing table he’d made me for the garage. Sometimes he’d bring it out into the sun and make me put my hat on. Then he could strip in the drive, radio on but not too loud, while I drew dinosaurs. Sometimes I’d get up and look at the cars and ask him things. But I wasn’t allowed under.

I followed my daddy everywhere and copied whatever he did. The older I got, the more stuff he let me help him with. When I was seven, I was allowed to cook with him properly. When I was ten and could read well enough, I was allowed to help him with research. When I was twelve, I was allowed to help with the cars. When I was fifteen, I got to join him on a hunt every now and again.

I had my friends and there was school and parties and karate. But there was also me and Dad, spending evenings together, looking into some obscure monster that someone needed help with. There was staying up late on Friday nights, watching old movies while we packed salt shells, unless I was busy painting my toenails.

He took me camping and to the shooting range, stuff he knew about. He helped me with my homework, and when the math started getting too hard, he took a course at the community college so he could help me better. He asked Mrs Dalton, the lady who took care of me, to show him how to plait my hair properly. He helped me run lines for the school play and he sat and let me draw or paint him.

When I came home from school crying, he listened and hugged me and helped me through whatever the trouble was. When the girls at school picked on me because of my acne, he said all the right things about how their opinion didn’t matter and I was beautiful inside and out. But he also took me to the doctor and paid for the acne medication and the million extra products I thought I needed. He even paid for every freckle bleaching con I wanted to try.

When Troy Baker-Garret asked me out and then showed up with some other girl, denying he’d ever asked me, saying I was a crazy bitch, in front of half the school, Dad took me to the shooting range. He said it was okay to pretend the target was Troy’s stupid face and helped me get the confidence to go to school on Monday.

Dad was polite to every boyfriend and date, even when he could tell they were dicks. He cancelled all his plans whenever I was coming home from college for a weekend, no matter how late notice.

Once I sent him a copy of my term paper, with my first college A on it, as a surprise. Next time I went home, he’d stuck it on the fridge, just like when I was little.

And now he was in some strange city in a coma, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how to help, or even if I could help. Maybe he’d been sick and I didn’t know. I’d left him to go off with Sam and Dean, and maybe he didn’t want to tell me he was sick in case I got mad and accused him of trying to make me come home again. Maybe he just didn’t want to worry me. But if I’d been home, there’d have been signs. I’d have known.

What if he died? What if it had been six months since he saw his only daughter and he died alone in Pittsburgh?

Dean dropped Sam and I right out front of the hospital and drove off to find a park. Sam came with me to the inquiry desk and then to the ward. He even texted Dean so he’d know where we were.

The lady at the desk upstairs said we could go right through to see Dad but that he was still comatose. She would tell his doctor we were there and he’d come as soon as he could to talk to me and explain what was happening. There was some other stuff, but I didn’t really hear her properly. As soon as she was done talking, I hurried into the room she’d said, and I could hear Sam’s heavy feet behind me.

There were two beds in the room, but the other one was unoccupied. Dad was nearest the door. He was all hooked up, with the heart monitor and the drip and whatever else. They’d put him in hospital scrubs and put a blanket over him. Apart from all the machines, it looked like he was sleeping, except Dad never slept so neat in his life. He was lying on his back, arms by his sides, in what was probably supposed to seem peaceful, but to me just seemed unnatural and wrong. That wasn’t Dad at all.

I’d thought maybe I’d run over or sit down and grab his hand all dramatic like a movie or something. Instead I just burst into tears. Sam grabbed me, and I was still sobbing into his shirt when I heard Dean come in.

“You seen a doctor?” he asked.

Above me, Sam told him we hadn’t. Then I was being led slowly in some direction, and gently guided down onto a chair. Then Sam’s warm bulk was gone and I had to cover my eyes with my hands.

With a very light tug on my elbows, Sam pulled my hands down. He was crouched down so our heads were level. With both my hands in one of his, he used his other thumb to wipe tears away from each of my eyes. They were quickly replaced as I was wracked by another spasm of sobbing.

“Tissues,” he said, gesturing to Dean. Then he was looking at me again, solemn, sweet eyes looking directly into mine as he ran his thumb over the back of my hand. “I know this is scary, Pea. But the doctor will be here soon, and it’ll help Bobby if you can answer questions and make decisions, okay?”

I nodded. He was right. I needed to have my shit together to talk to the doctor. I opened my mouth to speak to him, but the action changed my breathing just enough to send me sobbing again. Tears everywhere, I let out intermittent squeaks.

“Just breathe in and out like you taught me when we were little. Remember?”

The child shrinks taught me breathing techniques because of the nightmares about my mom. I’d taught them to Sam once, when he was crying about something.

I nodded and made the little “o” with my mouth, ignoring my blurred vision.

“In…” Sam said, watching me as I took in a load of air through my nose. “Out… Good work. In… Out… You want me to do it with you?”

He held my hands and breathed with me for a few minutes. Slowly, my breathing got even and normal, and that helped me stop sobbing. Sam kept my eyes on him, and took each breath with me, before finally reaching out to Dean for the tissues.

“Here,” he said, passing them to me. “Wipe your eyes so you can see again.”

I laughed a little at that, because he was right. My tears had clung to my eyelashes, forcing me to look through them and blurring everything. I used the wad of tissues to wipe them away, and then wiped at my nose, just in case my sobbing had been accompanied by grossness.

When I was done, Dean held a little metal bin out for me. I tossed the tissues in and he was just putting it down again when the doctor came in.

At least, I assumed that was what he was. He had a white coat and a badge and a clipboard, which is pretty doctory. He was quite a young guy, too, maybe early thirties.

“I’m Doctor Ryan,” he said, shaking hands with Dean and then Sam. I got up quick and shook his hand too. “You’re Mr Singer’s daughter?”

“Yeah… Yes…” I said. “Um… these are my cousins.”

He nodded, like that seemed plausible enough.

“Are you Dad’s doctor?” I asked.

“I haven’t been treating him today, but I’ve been on shift the last three hours, and I’ve had a full rundown from the treating doctors.”

“Oh… Okay…” I said. I guessed doctors just couldn’t hang around twenty-four hours a day, but I was kind of expecting to speak to the doctors who’d actually treated Dad. That was probably crazy. It was nearly nine o’clock at night.

“So, what’s the diagnosis?” asked Sam, getting to the point I was too out of it to get to.

“We’ve tested everything we can think to test,” said Doctor Ryan. “He seems perfectly healthy.”

“Except that he’s comatose,” said Dean, with only slightly less annoyance than I would have had, as he gestured to my apparently perfectly healthy unconscious father.

“Yes,” the doctor admitted. He looked away from Dean to me. “Is there anything we should know? Does your father have any pre-existing illnesses?”

I shook my head. “Dad doesn’t even get sick. He’s had a cold maybe three times my whole life.”

I could feel my tears starting to come back, but I remembered to breathe properly. If they hadn’t found anything physically wrong with Dad, perhaps that was a good thing. It could mean this was more our kind of thing than Doctor Ryan’s.

“Doctor, is there anything you can do?” asked Sam.

Doctor Ryan sighed. “Look, I’m sorry, but we don’t know what’s causing it… so we don’t know how to treat it. He just… went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”

I sat back down again, looking at Dad. Apart from the weird neat posture, he did kind of look like he was sleeping. So… maybe this situation wasn’t as serious as I’d thought. I’d been envisioning some horrible illness I hadn’t known about. But if he was physically fine, what we were dealing with might not have a physical cause.

But it might be caused by some _thing_. And if that was the case, I could gank that son of a bitch and get my father back.

I heard the doctor say a few more things to Dean and then he went out, leaving us with Dad. I waited a few beats until he was definitely gone.

“Okay… so maybe this isn’t a doctor thing. Maybe it’s a hunter thing.”

Sam frowned. “You reckon this is our kind of deal?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s a chance, right? And I can’t sit here doing nothing. But he said they did all those tests and couldn’t find any obvious cause, right?”

“Right,” Dean agreed.

“So… let’s see if we can find an unobvious cause…”

 

* * *

 

Sam brought my computer up from the car, and one of my blankets too. I set myself up to camp beside Dad. There were no rules or visiting hours. Maybe because they figured he was dying, or maybe because you don’t need set hours when the patient is comatose and can’t get tired out by too many visitors.

Whatever it was, they let me stay. Dean had driven all night, so I made him go lie down in the little visitors lounge. He tried to deny he needed the rest, but he yawned as he said it, and seeing he was defeated, he did as I asked him. For hours, Sam sat beside me. He fetched me coffee from the machine outside twice, and one time brought me back potato chips.

I looked through every relevant book that I had scanned copies of. Sam web searched on his phone in the meantime, getting up occasionally to stretch his legs and bring me stuff, or check on Dean.

About three in the morning, I heard a soft little snore and looked up at the chair beside me. His head had drooped a little and he had fallen asleep. His phone was dangling dangerously loosely from his fingers.

I grabbed it so it wouldn’t fall, and nudged his shoulder. His eyes opened slowly as he looked at me.

“Oh, sorry… Uh…”

“Sam… go to sleep, okay. There’s another couch in that room with Dean, right?”

“Two,” he said. “But it’s okay. I’ll stay with you.”

I shook my head. There was no point. I could keep going on my own, and if I found anything, I’d go and get him. Maybe he’d be more help on a few hours sleep anyway. Especially if I was operating on pure panic and caffeine.

He eventually agreed, but only if I walked with him to the visitor’s room. He said it would keep my blood pumping properly. I agreed to it, and even got myself another coffee on my way back. Dean had been fast asleep and I suspected Sam wouldn’t be far behind.

But there was no way I was sleeping. Not while something was wrong with Dad. I wasn’t even tired.

I spent all night skim reading books, and I saw the sun come up through the window beside the empty bed. I hadn’t been forcing myself to stay awake, exactly. The coffee was more to keep my mind focused, since I felt awake but not alert. Even at dawn, I still didn’t even feel drowsy, and my eyes easily stayed open as I read line after line of text.

I’d found a promising old tome about witchcraft with a whole chapter on sleeping spells. It was interesting for its own sake, but I hadn’t found anything specific that might explain Dad’s coma. All the same, I read it carefully, just in case. I was absorbed in it when I felt someone behind me. It was Dean. Sam followed just after him.

“Hey, Princess. It’s nearly nine o’clock. How about we head to the motel Bobby was staying at, huh?”

I shook my head. “Nah, I wanna stay here. Just in case…”

Sam came up to stand beside me. “Well, we were just saying how you’re probably right, and this is our kind of thing. So, it probably has to do with whatever job Bobby was working, right?”

“Yeah… I guess so…” It was pretty unlikely that Dad could be hurt like this by some supernatural means in a total coincidence.

“Well, he probably left some notes,” Dean said. “Motel says you can come get his stuff, so we should go check it out.”

I looked from Dean back to my Dad, still so silent and peaceful and… absent.

“I… Um… I dunno…”

Sam’s hand was on my shoulder. “You can’t do anything right now. Let’s go see what’s at the motel. We can always come back after.”

I finally agreed with a sigh, closing up my computer and letting Sam take it off me while Dean gathered up the mess I’d made from my little camp out. I leaned forward and touched Dad’s hand. It didn’t even twitch, and I expected it to every time.

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” I whispered, though the boys could probably hear me. “I’m gonna fix this. I promise.”

My Dad always fixed things. Whether I was sad, or angry or scared or sick or just failing math, Dad fixed things. It was my turn to fix things for him.

 

* * *

 

 

It was a pretty simple matter to go to the motel, say who I was and that I was there to collect Dad’s things. I was even able to prove it by showing my real, genuine ID, something that didn’t happen often.

The kid on the desk couldn’t let me in without authorisation from the manager. But I supposed that was fair enough. There has to be some kind of protection, I guess. The manager was already on her way into work for the morning, so we didn’t wait long. She checked my ID and said how sorry she was about what happened and asked how Dad was doing. She was nice. In the end, we told her we’d just take the room Dad had been in, since it was a twin room anyway.

The decor was appalling. I was becoming a connoisseur of crappy to mid price motel rooms and their awful decorating choices. This one was on a different level, with its blue, yellow and green print wallpaper. Yikes!

The room was pretty neat when we got in. Someone had been by to clean up, so the beds were made. Dad always unpacked when he arrived in a motel room, instead of living out of his bag like the boys and I.

“So, you don’t know anything about this job Bobby was working?” Dean asked as we looked around us. “He didn’t give you any clue at all.”

I shook my head. “Just that it was a little thing and not to worry about it.” I put my bag down in the corner, setting the bedroll next to it.

Sam was carrying my blankets and he handed them to me absently. “Well… doesn’t look like he left anything lying around. Research or news clippings...”

“Or a friggin’ pizza box or a beer can,” Dean added, dumping his own stuff. “There’s nothing here.”

I edged past Dean, pushing him gently out of my way as I went to the closet and opened it. “Behold!”

On either side of me, Sam and Dean leant in and looked at the contents of the closet.

“It’s… uh… it’s shirts…” said Sam.

I just gave him a pleasant smile as I pushed the shirts to each side. That was why Dad always unpacked everything. Because it allowed him to put it in the closet to cover up what was inside.

The back wall was an organised chaos of maps, photographs, press clippings and yellow sticky notes. There was a whole lot of stuff about plants, and on one of his maps, he’d scrawled “Pittsburgh” very dramatically.

Dean chuckled. “Good old Bobby, always covering up his tracks.”

I grabbed a piece of paper, and it didn’t take much to pull it down and out from under the pin. There was no particular reason for my choosing it over all the others. It was just at a good height and had caught my eye. It was a picture and description of a plant.

“ _Silene Capensis_ ,” I read aloud. “That sounds familiar…”

“Seems like whatever he was up to, plants were involved,” Dean said, taking a look at the page over my shoulder

“Here,” Sam said, pulling another page down. “An obit. Uh… Doctor Walter Gregg, 64, University Neurologist.”

Dean and I both looked up from the page.

“How’d he bite it?” asked Dean.

“Um… actually, they don’t know,” Sam said. He’d already skimmed over the whole article, presumably. He was such a fast reader. “They say he just went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”

Now he really had my attention. “Really?” I put the page in my hand down gently on the bed beside me and moved to stand beside Sam so I could look at the article. He had to hold it down a little lower so I could read it.

It was just like he said. Doctor Gregg’s death had been put down to natural causes, though he spent several days in a coma first. He had no pre-existing illnesses and the family was devastated. That was all it really said. Apart from the funeral time and the stuff about him being loved and respected and all that.

Sam handed me the article and turned to scan the pages in the closet again. “All right, um… So let’s say Bobby was looking into the doc’s death. You know, hunting after something…”

“...that started hunting him,” Dean finished.

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Alright. You two stay here and see if you can make heads or tails of all this,” Dean said, pointing to the mess of printouts and notes.

“What will you do?” I asked.

“I’m gonna look into the good doctor myself.”

I made him at least change his clothes first, but he headed out soon after. By then, Sam and I had already pulled everything off the closet wall and started going through it. We were able to give Dean the details of one of the dead neurologist’s colleagues at the University, which at least gave him a starting point.

Sam made me have a shower and change my own clothes. While I was showering, I was able to take a good look at my leg. It was so strange. I had told Dad it was “just a nasty scratch” and since I’d used the potion on it, that was what it was. It still hurt just a tad to walk on, but that was probably because the potion hadn’t penetrated as deep as the wound. It was more than bearable, though. I took the opportunity to shave properly, and then I was able to change into one of my remaining two pairs of jeans, and throw on a plaid as well. I didn’t bother to wash my hair.

When I came out, Sam had notes scattered over the table. I grabbed that original page from him and stared at it.

_Silene Capensis_ was the name of the white flowered plant. I had definitely read it before. And recently.

“Do you recognise it?” I asked.

Sam shook his head, and looked back down at the page he was reading. He had such a good memory for details, if it was something he’d seen he was bound to recognise it.

Then I remembered… That chapter about sleep spells and witchcraft. I grabbed my computer and plugged it in, opening it back up and turning it back on.

“I saw it in a book last night,” I told Sam. “Something to do with dream manipulation or something? I’ll show you.”

Sam smiled, and pulled out a chair for me to sit down. “See. It’s gonna be okay. We’re making progress already.”


	64. Chapter 63: Sexy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has a dream she’s pretty embarrassed about. But not half as embarrassed as Sam is later in the day…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you know me, you may be aware that I am a big fan of Sam’s sexy dream in this ep, and I thought it would be fun to play around with it a little. The first and last scenes of this chapter were just the funnest!!!

I dreamed of a huge library that seemed to go forever and searching endless books. Every time I opened one it was blank and had none of the answers I was seeking. I dreamed of my Dad’s voice, calling and calling me, somewhere in the distance, but I could never find him and still there were shelves of useless empty books, towering over me.

I dreamed of the study at home. I was glued to a book about crossroads deals, curled up on the couch with my feet under me. I was half leaning against Sam, who was sitting beside me, his laptop on his knees. It was half memory, half dream. I dreamed that we talked about Dean and Hell and he asked me if I really thought there was a way and I lied and said I did.

I dreamed of Hell, and Dean screaming.

Then I dreamed of knocking, and I woke up to find it was real knocking.

I was alone in the motel room, and someone was rapping politely on the door. I’d fallen asleep in my clothes, and I quickly jumped up off the bed and went to see who was knocking.

Opening the door just a crack, I peered through. It was Bela… Bela Talbot who had once shot Sam in the shoulder and then hindered us on that Ghost Ship case in Massachusetts. She was wearing a simple but expensive looking cream trenchcoat, and had her beautiful bouncy hair out around her shoulders. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing there, or how she knew where to find me.

With a sign, I opened the door to let her in. Ignoring the decor, she just looked at me as she entered, keeping her eyes on me as I closed the door behind her.

“Hey Ellie,” she said, though she’d never used my name before. I knew from Dean that even when she talked _about_ me, she still just called me “Denim”.

“Bela,” I said, with a frown. “I never thought I’d see you here…”

“Well, I’m full of surprises,” she replied. “Though truthfully,” and she began to reach for the belt of her coat, untying it as she moved towards me. “You wanna know why I’m here?”

“K…” I muttered, as she got so close, I found myself backed up against the door.

“Because of you…”

As she opened the coat, I saw that underneath, she wore nothing but a lacy black slip, tight, short and somewhat see-through. I tried not to look down, but I couldn’t help it! My first impression was how smooth her skin looked. The same light brown skin tone on her face was all over, from her super slender, fragile looking shoulders to her lean, toned legs. I especially tried to avoid her breasts, but it was pretty hard when they were there, looking soft but firm, the lacy hem of her slip dipping down to expose the soft line of her cleavage.

I swallowed, forcing my eyes back up. Not that it helped. She was so pretty. “Uh… What are you doing?”

She reached up, cupping my cheek with her hand. Her palm was so soft, and her hand so delicate and I felt a rush of nervous heat at the thought of what she probably do with them.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” she said.

That was not something I ever would have expected her to say. “What?” I asked, trying not to look at how soft and rounded her bottom lip was.

Like she sensed my attention, she lifted herself a little higher and pulled my face forward to kiss me. Her lips were even softer than I would have imagined, and her slight little hands gripped my hips, pulling herself into me. I felt such a surge of pleasure deep down in my centre that I had to put my hands on her arms, just to steady myself.

I pulled away for a moment, to be absolutely sure about what was happening, because if this went any further, I didn’t think I’d be able to stop, even if I thought about how much I disliked her. That was hard to remember when she was so soft and smooth and small.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She answered by pulling me into her again, and putting her lips on mine. Though she was pulling me so tight into her that we were practically one, it wasn’t a violent or desperate kiss. I’d never really been into that. It was slow and sweet, and always delicate, like we had all the time in the world.

As her long fingers sought the bare skin beneath my shirt, my own hands slid down her arms, to rest on her hips. As she opened her mouth and her tongue pushed firmly, but cautiously against mine, I guided her slowly towards the bed I’d been sleeping on.

We reached it as she began moving her hands up my waist, lifting my shirt as she did so. She stopped kissing me, long enough to sit down on the edge of the bed, but then she pulled me down towards her…

“Oh… Ellie…” She moaned. “Mmm… Ellie…”

 

* * *

 

 

“Ellie...”

I woke up with a start. I was lying on one of the beds in the motel room, and Sam was beside me, his hand on my shoulder as he gently shook me.

“Ellie… Hey, wake up Pea…”

I looked at him, confused for a moment. I’d been dreaming about him, and then about Dean screaming in Hell. Then I’d woken up and Bela had shown up, in her underwear, to seduce me and… Oh.

Like that would ever happen! Get it together, Ellie.

“I was… I fell ‘sleep?” I asked. The last real thing I could remember was Dean going off to interview the dead professor’s colleagues. And then Sam and I had started getting stuck into the clippings and photocopies Dad had left behind.

“Yeah,” said Sam, going back to the table. “You fell asleep at the table. I woke you, but you were so out of it, you just fell right back to sleep again. I put you to bed.”

I didn’t remember that at all. But I had stayed awake all night, and that had to be made up for sometime. I rubbed my eyes, trying to get my bearings again. Why the Hell did I have a sex dream about Bela? I hated Bela!

It was pretty hard to deny how gorgeous she was though…

“Yeah. Thanks… Um… What I miss?”

“Nothing important,” he said. “I did some more looking into the African Dream Root and the whole Dreamwalking thing. It’s a pretty clear picture now. Dean wants to meet us back at the hospital, so I’ll tell you about it then.”

I nodded, getting back to my feet. I’d need to splash some water on my face or something. To wake me up, and to cool me down. Sam couldn’t tell, could he? He didn’t know what I’d just dreamed about. Hopefully...

“How long was I out?” I asked, trying not to let my shame show in my face.

“Hours,” Sam said. “It’s nearly three. I was going to wake you anyway, when Dean called.”

“Thanks,” I called, as I headed into the bathroom. “When are we meeting him?”

“Soon as we can,” he called back.

It took me fifteen minutes to wash my face, put my shoes on and get my shit together enough to leave. We still had to wait another ten minutes for a taxi, and by then I was much more with it. I’d had a good four hours sleep, hardly enough to make up for the whole night I’d missed, but I’d be able to make it through the rest of the day and hopefully get some sleep at night.

 

* * *

 

 

Dean was already waiting in Dad’s room when we got to the hospital. He immediately vacated the little chair, and gently ushered me in that direction. I sat down, feeling Dad’s hand again. It was still just as still and unresponsive as before.

“The doctors say anything?” I asked.

Dean frowned. “No change.”

I just sighed and leaned back in my chair a little.

“So, you said you found out what this Doctor Gregg was working on?”

Dean nodded, leaning back against the wall opposite the bed, looking across at Dad. Sam stayed standing, hovering between us and the door.

“Our doctor was working on a little something off the books. Officially, he was studying sleep disorders, but even his lab assistant didn’t know about some of it. Real experimental stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked.

“There’s this thing. Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome. It’s when you can’t dream. After you get hit on the head or something. The doctor reckoned he had a cure.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “What was it? Why was it a secret?”

“Some sort of yellow tea,” Dean said. “He said it was herbal. It worked, but according to this kid Jeremy, the dreams he had were pretty nasty. He said it was like a bad acid trip. It scared him, so he dropped out of the study.”

“Yellow tea?” I asked, thinking of the plant Sam and I had been researching before I passed out.

“Well, Bobby’s wall is starting to make a hell of a lot more sense,” said Sam, looking through the folder he’d brought with him.

“How so?” Dean asked.

Sam held up the picture of the white flower. “This plant, _Silene capensis_ is also known as African Dream Root. It’s been used by shaman and medicine men for centuries.”

“Let me guess. They dose up, bust out the didgeredoos, start kicking around the hackey?” asked Dean.

I shook my head. “No, it’s kinda cooler than that. If you believe the legends, you can use it for dreamwalking. Entering people’s dreams and stuff.”

“I take it we believe the legends?” Dean asked.

I laughed. “When don’t we?”

“But dreamwalking is just the tip of the iceberg,” Sam said, as Dean took the page from him to look at it.

“What do you mean?”

“This dream root is some serious mojo,” I said. “Powerful stuff.”

“You take enough of it, with practice, you can become a regular Freddy Krueger,” Sam explained. “You can control anything. You could turn bad dreams good, you could turn good dreams bad.”

Thank God no one had been looking at my dreams earlier!

“And killing people in their sleep?” Dean asked. I tried to avoid looking at Dad but I couldn’t help it.

“For example,” Sam said, with a sigh.

But if this theory was right, that meant whatever had gone after Dad was a human, using this Dream Root stuff to attack him. And hunting a human is hard, because they look like everyone else. It was like dealing with witches again. Anyone could be hurting Dad from behind closed doors and we had no way of finding them.

“So, let’s say…” began Sam, uncertainly. “Uh… let’s say this doc was testing stuff on his patients, Tim Leary style?”

“One of them doesn’t like it and decides to pay him a visit in his dreams?” I suggested.

“Makes sense,” said Dean.

“But what about Bobby?” asked Sam.

I looked from Dad back up to Sam, his brow crinkled with uncertainty.

“I mean, if the killer came after him, how come he’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Maybe Dad was fighting somehow when Doctor Gregg didn’t? I leaned forward to look at him, still lying so uncharacteristically still and neat. Was he fighting someone off inside his head? If so, how long could he last? I stood up.

“For whatever reason, Dad’s still holding on,” I said. “But we don’t know for how long. So we gotta find this son of a bitch sooner rather than later.”

I beckoned them to follow me as I started making my way out of the room. I heard both their footsteps behind me, quickening steps catching up until they were on either side of me.

“So how do we find our homicidal sandman?” asked Dean.

“Could be anyone,” Sam said.

“Yeah?” his brother sighed.

“Yeah,” I said. I hated hunting humans who could hide in plain sight.

“Anyone who knew the doctor had access to his dream shrooms,” said Dean.

“I still think one of his test subjects, maybe,” I suggested again.

“Possible,” Dean said, with a nod. “But his research was pretty sketchy. I mean… I don’t know how many subjects he had or who all of them were.”

Sam made a strange noise, halfway been a sigh and a laugh. We both looked at him.

“What?” asked Dean.

“In any other case, we’d be calling Bobby and asking him for help right now.”

I sighed. He was right. This was definitely the point where we’d usually call Dad and get his input. Sometimes he knew right out what was going on, but other times he’d hit the books. Just like he and I used to do together.

It took me a few moments to notice Dean had stopped walking. He gripped my arm, and Sam stopped as well, looking at him.

“You know what… Sam’s right.”

“Huh?”

“What?” asked Sam.

“Let’s go talk to him.”

“Sure,” scoffed Sam. “I think we might find the conversation a bit one-sided.”

“Not if we’re tripping on some Dream Root…”

“What?”

But Dean was onto something. Trouble was, we were only working on what Dad had left behind in his motel room. If he’d actually figured out who the killer was, maybe that was why he’d been targeted. But without being able to talk to him, we were back to the start and would have to do all his work over again! But if we could use Dream Root, get inside his head… maybe we could just ask.

It would save us a lot of time, and time was exactly what we needed.

“Yes!” I said.

“You wanna go walking around inside Bobby’s head?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, why not?” Dean said. “Maybe we could help…”

“Let’s do it,” I said. Then I realised. Going into Dad’s dreams we could see anything. Maybe things he didn’t want us seeing. Especially the boys. They didn’t know what I knew.

“We have no idea what’s crawling around in there,” Sam said, echoing this thought.

“How bad could it be?” Dean asked.

I didn’t know how to answer, but Sam summed up my thoughts pretty well.

“Bad,” he said. He had _no idea_.

“Dude, it’s Bobby,” said Dean.

I couldn’t think of a better idea, so I didn’t contradict him. But there was some dark stuff in Dad’s head, for sure.

Sam considered it and then nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. One problem though. We’re fresh out of African Dream Root so unless you know someone who can score some…”

“Crap,” said Dean, suddenly. We stared at him, waiting for an explanation. It sounded like he did know someone. “Bela,” he said.

“Bela?” I asked, trying not to blush. Dean didn’t know anything about my dream and there was no reason why he ever would even suspect. Just be cool, Ellie. Be cool.

“Crap,” Sam agreed. “You’re actually suggesting we ask her a favour?”

“I feel dirty just thinking about it,” I said. Calling Bela and asking her for something meant legitimising what she did and I wasn’t really up for that.

“Me too,” said Dean. “But I bet she knows where to get some.”

We had been stopped in a hospital corridor for some time, discussing dreamwalking and Dream Root, and I’d barely noticed. As Dean started walking again, I realised nurses and doctors and other medical types had been walking back and forth around us the whole time.

I looked up at Sam, trying to gauge his reaction. He smiled slightly at me and shrugged his shoulders. He was right. I couldn’t think of a better way of getting hold of what we needed. Bela knew people.

But we seemed to sigh in unison, before we stepped forward together, hurrying after Dean.

 

* * *

 

 

Bela said no.

Dean called her, explained what we wanted and why, but she refused, telling him she was busy and that Dream Root was much too valuable for her to just give away. He couldn’t even make the argument that we’d saved her life, because she had paid us over twenty grand between us for that and it’s hard to deny that was generous when we’d been expecting nothing.

So we went back to work. Sam and I pored over Dad’s notes, while Dean did his best to decipher Doctor Gregg’s records. His handwriting was small and difficult to read, not that it made much sense anyway. None of us was neuroscientists and he seemed to use a lot of shorthand and jargon which made no sense to us. Still, Dean made the best effort he could.

We had some dinner, taking a break to clear our heads. I spent a good hour looking for possible sources of Dream Root, hoping there might be some supplier near enough for Dean to get there and back in a few hours, but I didn’t have any luck. Meanwhile, Sam fell asleep at the table, his head flopping down onto the papers in front of him. I smiled when I noticed.

Sam was cute when he was asleep. He looked peaceful and some of the semi-permanent sadness in his features was gone. His face was all squished up against his arm and the table beneath his cheek. Every now and again, he would make some face or another, generally quite happy-looking. It was hard to say what he was dreaming.

Dean and I figured we’d let him sleep. He’d have been better off in bed, but he looked so sweet and peaceful I didn’t have the heart to wake him. Dean would never have said so, but maybe he felt the same.

Frustrated with my Dream Root search, I joined Dean on his bed to see if I could have any more luck with Doctor Gregg’s notes than he did. We sat together, squinting at different pages in a silent, companionable sort of way. Every now and again, we’d show a page to each other, for help figuring out a word, or we’d read a section aloud, hoping we could piece together enough about the test subjects to see if any of them was a likely suspect.

Maybe two hours later, there was a moan from Sam and I looked up. I thought maybe he’d woken, but he still had his head down, his cheek pressed to the table, his arm curled around his head. Must have been dreaming. I looked back down at my page.

A minute later, another moan. Louder. And kind of… sexual. This time, Dean looked up too, and he raised an eyebrow. I hid a smirk as I examined Sam’s face. It was hard to read his expressions too clearly when his face was a little squished. But that was definitely a smile.

As Dean and I both watched, he let out a much louder groan, and I had to throw my hand over my mouth to stifle a giggle. I’d heard that groan plenty of times before, from plenty of people. Usually while they were naked.

“Maybe he’s dreaming he’s eating a really great salad,” said Dean, with a wide grin.

I sniggered into my hand. “Oh it’s definitely something wholesome like that. And enjoying a civilised conversation.”

Was he drooling? There seemed to be some saliva as he emitted abother loud, enthusiastic moan.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Food, conversation… He’s enjoying all kinds of oral-based activities.”

Dean laughed so hard he nearly dropped the stack of papers from his knees. The sound made Sam stir slightly, his moan a little softer, but no less satisfied-sounding, as he tilted his head. With a smile, I set my little bundle of papers down beside me and got up.

It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who had dirty dreams. I knew Sam was no pure sunflower, and he’d had a long term girlfriend and everything. But I always thought of him as quiet innocent and sweet. He had probably done a thing or two, but I didn’t exactly picture him as a lustful type. It was a relief to know he had the occasional dirty thought the same as anyone. It made me feel less guilty about wanting to climb him like a tree.

Dean chuckled as I tiptoed across the room to where his brother sat. The table was not that high and I was easily able to lift myself up to sit up there, my legs dangling beside him. I lifted a hand to nudge his shoulder.

“Sam…”

He only moaned again, and evidently, his dream was getting good.

“Sam,” I said louder, nudging him again. Sure, it was a bit mean to tease him, but honestly, it was probably better for him to wake up. I wouldn’t want someone to hear my every moan while I was having a dirty dream.

I remembered my dream about Bela from earlier in the day. Supposing I’d said her _name_! No… much better to wake Sam.

“Sam!” I shouted this time, shoving him hard.

His head shot up suddenly and he almost fell off the chair. “Ellie! Huh?”

Meanwhile, Dean was laughing his ass off. “Dude, who were you dreaming about?”

“No one,” Sam said, way too quickly. He was staring at me, shifting uncomfortably as he blushed.

“Those were some serious noises you were making for no one,” I teased.

“I wasn’t…” he muttered, still shifting, trying to turn his body away from me. “Never mind!”

“You can tell us,” I said. I looked down and noticed why he was trying to face the opposite direction. He had a problem. A surprisingly… big… problem.

Awkward. At least I never had that issue to deal with.

“Angelina Jolie?” asked Dean.

“No,” Sam said, as I got up to sit back on the bed. I didn’t need to embarrass him further by looking at things he was trying to hide.

_Damn_ , though.

“Brad Pitt?” Dean asked, with such a casual, unconcerned air that I wondered if maybe Sam was right that I worried too much about how he might react to my own secret.

“No. No! Dude, it doesn’t matter!”

Maybe Sam wasn’t quite the innocent I thought he was, but he obviously wasn’t as comfortable with this subject as Dean and I. Perhaps a little friendly teasing, just to show him that it wasn’t something to be embarrassed about.

“Was it me?” I asked. “I’m flattered, Sam, but I hope dream me is less selfish than real me!”

He stared at me. “What? No! Of course it wasn’t you! I wouldn’t… I mean… not that you’re…” Clearly, he was worried about insulting me while denying he’d been dreaming about me. But he didn’t need to worry. I was a realist.

I laughed. “I was joking Sam! Look at you, and look at me. People dream up, not down!” He was still staring at me, and his mouth fell open slightly. “I’m just trying to break the tension. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve all been there.”

Beside me, Dean smirked in a way that indicated that he had _definitely_ been there, repeatedly.

“Huh…” murmured Sam nervously. “Uh… thanks, Ellie.”

I winked at him. “No problem, babe! May we all have dreams as good as yours!”

He stood up, and gave me a weak sort of smile as he quickly made his way into the bathroom. Poor thing. At least when I’d woken up from my own embarrassing fantasy earlier, there hadn’t been any physical sign. A little bit of blushing that could be put down to confusion and I was able to fake it.

I’d gotten away with having a very embarrassing, very shameful, very sexy dream and once I’d gotten my bearings, there was no cause for further embarrassment.

A minute or so after Sam disappeared behind the bathroom door, there was a knock. At first I thought it was him for some reason, but then I realised it was coming from the main door of the room. Dean looked at me like he had no intention of answering. With a sigh, I put my papers down again and got up to go see who it was.

There was no peep hole so I just opened the door a crack and peered through.

What had I just been thinking about my good luck and lack of lasting embarrassment???

There was a very pretty woman, with delicate hands and soft hair and beautiful smooth tanned skin. She was wearing a trenchcoat that seemed vaguely familiar.

Bela.


	65. Chapter 64: Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First Ellie has to deal with talking to Bela (a nightmare in itself), but then she has to go dreamwalking inside her father’s nightmares…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is the longest chapter yet, I think. Oopsy Daisy!

For a minute I wondered if maybe I was dreaming again. But would I really have a sex dream about Bela that also featured Sam and Dean in the room? I wasn’t entirely unadventurous, but that was not the sort of shit I was into.

In my dream, Bela was wearing a cream or tan trenchcoat, but now she was wearing a black one, and it was longer. But, I couldn’t see what she had underneath it and I had a sudden flashback to my dream, of her taking it off and the shape of her breasts underneath. I swallowed.

“Bela! Hi! Um… Guys… Bela’s here.” I opened the door to let her in, gesturing to her obviously as she entered. “See… It’s Bela.”

Dean stared at me. “Yeah. Thanks for the colour commentary.” He shook his head as though shaking my social ineptitude off, and turned to our guest. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You called me,” she said, amusement in her posh accent. “Remember?”

“I remember you turning me down,” Dean said, getting up. He nudged me out of the way and took the door from my fingers, closing it.

Oh. Yeah. Doors should be closed. I was still staring at Bela, wondering what was under her coat. Her legs were bare, and it was totally possible she was naked under there. I swallowed heavily.

“Well, I’m just full of surprises,” Bela shrugged, looking me up and down and raising both eyebrows as she settled on my blushing face.

_Oh God_ , I thought.  _She knows_.

I didn’t know how Bela could tell what I’d dreamed, but I must have shown something in my face when I looked at her. Now she was opening her big black purse as Sam came out of the bathroom.

“Bela?” he asked, looking to Dean. “I thought you said she refused?”

“She did,” Dean said.

Sam sat down on his bed, looking expectantly at Bela, with an expression only marginally less hostile than his brother’s. Meanwhile, I was still standing in the middle of the floor like an idiot. I willed myself to move.

Bela pulled a jar out of her purse and handed it to me. My fingers brushed up against hers and I blushed again. The jar was full of a grassy sort of herb.

“Apparently, you need this, Denim,” she said, setting her purse down on the TV.

I stared at the jar, trying to figure out what was going on. A jar? Oh! The African Dream Root! For Dad!

Her hands went to the belt of her coat, and she started to undo it. My knees went weak and I felt the flush over my whole face, and probably my neck as well. I backed up a few steps and plopped down next to Sam. I almost sat on him, and as my hip and arm pressed against his, I felt his whole body stiffen. I must have jolted him as I had all but collapsed.

“Nasty stuff,” Bela noted, nodding towards me and the jar, her delicate fingers deftly working open the top button on her coat. “And not easy to come by.”

Dean frowned. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

“What? I can’t do you a little favour every now and again?”

She finished with the last button and her coat started to slip off her shoulders. My fingers tensed around the jar and I stared, not sure whether I was hoping she would be naked or hoping she wouldn’t be.

But as she shrugged the coat off and folded it over, I saw she was just wearing a regular shirt, and a skirt that stopped above her knee. They were fitted, though, so I could see her shape pretty clearly. And since she was talking to Dean, that meant I got a great view of her butt.

“No. You can’t,” said Dean, while I bit my lip and looked away.

I nudged Sam, so I could show him the jar and focus on that. He turned towards me, his cheeks flushed. Was he trying not to perv on Bela too?

I smiled in solidarity and handed him the jar. He blinked at me, surprised, then gave a cute little smile back, blushed again and took the jar off me, concentrating intensely on what was inside.

“Come on, I wanna know what the strings are before you attach them,” Dean said.

Bela sighed. “I’m not doing it for you. Or Denim. It’s for Bobby.”

“Huh?” I asked, finally finding my voice. “Why? How come? What?”

“He saved my life once,” Bela said, as she turned towards me. “In Flagstaff.”

Sam looked up and now all three of us were staring at her. Until she looked back at me, and I got nervous and focused on my knees.

Bela sighed again. “I screwed up and he saved me, okay? You satisfied?”

It sounded plausible enough. I knew from experience that Bela could screw things up, and Dad would certainly save her, whether he thought she deserved it or not. Just like I did.

“Maybe,” said Dean.

There was a brief silence. I was still staring at my knees, so I couldn’t tell what was going on with the others, though I could feel Sam’s stiff posture beside me and hear his shallow breathing. Bela had the whole room hot and bothered. I hoped maybe that would draw attention away from me.

“So, when do we go on this little magical mystery tour?”

Apparently, Dean was the only one who could still speak and think coherently in Bela’s presence. “Oh, you’re not going anywhere. I don’t trust you enough to let you in my car, much less Bobby’s head. No offence.”

As Dean came over, I looked up, to see Sam was staring as blankly at the jar as I had. Dean took it from him, and paying little attention, took it over to the safe.

“None taken,” said Bela, with a tone that said otherwise.

While Bela’s attention was on Dean, I took the opportunity to look up at her. Her slight pout made me think about kissing her in my dream again and I squirmed, bumping Sam. His response was to shift away from me a little.

Rude.

“It’s two am,” Bela was protesting to Dean as I focused back on my knees. Doing so caused me to notice the thickness of my thighs. No way would a girl who looked like Bela ever be interested in me. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“Get a room,” Dean said, sharply.

I looked up, with a gasp. “Huh? What?”

Bela wasn’t the only one to look at me. She raised one eyebrow, while Sam glanced at me for a moment and then looked away again. Dean stared.

“She should get a room,” he reiterated. “Cos she’s not staying here.”

I let out a short laugh of nervousness, feeling the red in my face. I thought he was reading my mind and saying me and Bela should get a room. Oops!

Irritated, Bela grabbed her bag and her coat and marched towards the door. Without another word she opened it and went out.

“B… bye!” I called after her, and then winced with embarrassment. What was I doing? I hated her.

After the door slammed, Dean sat down on his bed and looked across at the two of us. “What the hell is wrong with you two?”

“Huh?” asked Sam. “I’m… there’s nothing… I’m fine.”

“Me too!” I rushed to say. “I’m good.”

“Uh huh… So, when are we gonna take this trip?” he asked. “Sooner the better, right?”

His use of “we” reminded me of my dilemma and shook me back to reality. “Um… yeah… about that? Does it really need all three of us to visit one man’s dreams?”

“Well, I dunno,” Sam said, standing up. “From what we were reading, it kinda sounds like it could be dangerous in there. If someone’s dreamwalking in Bobby’s head, they could attack. And cause real world damage.”

“Right,” Dean agreed. “We always got each other’s backs. Why should this be any different?”

I sighed. “Cos… cos it’s my Dad’s head? And a person’s head is kinda… private.”

“Ellie, this is an emergency,” said Dean.

“Yeah, I get that. But… one person has already invaded his mind and it seems like the less people in there, potentially seeing his secrets, the better.”

“I guess at least one of us should stay back to watch over the others, anyway,” Sam said. “What if you two go in, and I stay here?”

“How about I go in and you two watch me?” I countered.

“On your own?” asked Dean. “Isn’t that the exact opposite of what Bobby wants for you?”

I bit my lip to avoid snapping at him. He meant well. And he was right, that was what Dad wanted. For me to never hunt alone or risk myself for any reason.

“I don’t care what Dad wants!” Then I hesitated. “Except, I do. Cos I’m really sure he doesn’t want you looking around in his dreams and his memories and stuff.”

Dean chuckled. “It’s Bobby! What deep dark secrets could he even have?”

I did not answer him. But my Dad had at least one secret that was deeper and darker than Dean could ever imagine.

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secret,” I said. “Trust me. He doesn’t want you in there.”

“Ellie…”

Sam interrupted him. “I don’t like it any more than you, Dean. But Ellie’s his daughter. She’s the one he trusts to make his medical decisions. So… if she says he wouldn’t want it, we have to take her word for it.”

Dean frowned. “Okay. Fine. But we’re waking you up at the first sign of trouble.”

What would trouble even look like if it happened inside Dad’s head?

* * *

We figured I ought to go in straight away. If Dad was fighting in there, then we didn’t know how long he could hold out, so the sooner I got there to help him, the better.

Sam had already collected some of Dad’s hair. Dean was disgusted that I had to drink it, and decided maybe it was better that only I did it. It took Sam a while to prepare the stuff, and as he did so, I got myself mentally ready to go in.

If someone was attacking Dad using his dreams, they were likely to go for something nightmarish. As a hunter, there was a lot of nightmare fodder floating around in Dad’s head, but it wasn’t ghosts or vampires that concerned me. Truth was, if Dad was dreaming about something that would truly upset him, there were two distinct possibilities.

The first was one of the memories of tragedy lingering inside his mind. And those were bad. There was my mom’s death, and my near murder, for one thing. And that was by no means the only memory Dad had of awful things happening to me. I’d given him nightmares enough over the previous year alone. For that matter, there was his father. I knew a little bit about Dad’s childhood and it wasn’t nice. This was what I was trying to hide from Sam and Dean. Dad had made the choice to tell me, in bits and pieces, about his life. I knew that Dad had killed his own father in self defence, though none of the details. The likelihood of my seeing something more secret than that seemed pretty slim.

The other thing Dad’s nightmares might be based on would be imagined dangers. I guessed from his past behaviour that those would be more about me than they would about him. So… it was possible I might see dreadful things happening to myself in his dream. Or worse, that my presence in the dream would mean those things actually happened to me, the real me, instead of the one in his head.

It was a risk I would have to take.

I sat on Sam’s bed, ready to take the Dream Root. It was supposed to knock me unconscious, so I didn’t want to hurt myself, in case it was a sudden thing.

As Sam brought the drink over, Dean pulled a chair up beside the bed.

“We’re gonna take it in turns to sit right here,” he said. “If it looks like something bad is happening to you, we’re waking you up. Or else one of us is coming in.”

“How will you know?” I asked.

“You might thrash around or something,” Sam suggested, handing me the cup. It was a gross brown liquid, worse looking than Ruby’s potion. It was slightly frothy, and it smelled foul. “I made a spare, in case it does look really bad, and we think you need help.”

I considered the boys for a moment. I trusted Sam the most, but Dad had always seemed like he got on better with Dean. I knew which one I’d prefer in my head, but I wasn’t sure about Dad. Maybe he wouldn’t care, if it came down to a choice. I decided against telling them which one should come in to my rescue, and figured, if it came up, they could decide between themselves.

“Smells great,” I said, crinkling my nose as I brought it up closer to my face.

“It might be you gotta help him fight something off,” Sam said. “But it also could just be that you have to tell him what’s happening and get him to wake up. He might be able to wake if he knows he’s asleep. Or he might have to kill something or resolve something first. You’ll know when you get there.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “And, when he wakes up, what happens to me?”

“You’ll wake up too,” said Sam. “You ready?”

“Guess so.” I smiled. “Goodnight Sam.”

“Goodnight Ellie,” he replied, as he did every night.

“Screw you Dean.”

“Screw you too, Princess.”

Our nightly ritual complete, I had no more excuse not to swallow the stuff and take the plunge. I poured it into my mouth, trying not to gag. It tasted like a combination of dirt and vomit. Swallowing was hard, when my instinct was to get it away from me, but I managed to get it down.

Nothing happened.

I looked up at Sam, on my left, then to Dean on the right.

“It didn’t work…” I said, turning back to Sam again. But he was gone. Startled, I turned my head again, but now Dean was gone too.

I stood up in a panic, looking around the room. Neither of them were there. As I searched for them, I noticed the window. It had been night time, and now it was day. And snowing.

Astonished, I moved closer to the window and stared through the glass. there was a thick blanket of snow outside, falling from a very dark sky, filled with clouds so grey they were almost black. There was no blue sky anywhere in sight.

I hated snow. With a frown, I turned back around. I had begun to suspect I had already fallen asleep and gone into a dream, and now I knew it. I was no longer in the motel room. The horrific green, blue and yellow wallpaper was gone, replaced by a room with white walls and bright pink trim.

In the middle of the room was a bed with a plain white frame and pink fairy sheets. There was a dollhouse in one corner, and drawings stuck up on the walls. Crayons had been wielded carefully but childishly, portraying dinosaurs and dogs, pixies and palaces. There was a rug on the wooden floorboards, shaped like a big pink and purple flower. It was thick and luxurious, very comfortable for a little girl to sit on while she drew or played dollhouse. A few postcards were stuck to the closet door and a little string of fairy lights was strung around the mirror. My laptop was on the desk.

It was my room, but not as it was in any particular period. The bed was the one from when I was little, and the sheets were very toddler Ellie. The fairy lights were from when I was in High School, while the laptop was modern and the drawings looked like the kind I did when I was six. I’d gotten rid of the rug at about eleven. The arrangement of the furniture was as it had been before my most recent reshuffle.

My little blue stegosaurus toy, Fluffasaurus, was on the bedside table, which wasn’t surprising, since he had lived in my room nearly as long as me. But he looked brand new, rather than scuffed and misshapen with one eye replaced.

It was a sort of amalgam of my room as it had appeared at different times in my life. Since this was Dad’s dream and not mine, maybe these were the things he associated with my bedroom the most. That would make sense.

I looked around again. This was how Dad saw me? Fairy sheets and drawings in crayon. Postcards, Fluffasaurus, the laptop, fairy lights and a flower rug. I frowned. There was a lot more of little girl Ellie than there was representing me as a grown-up. Though maybe that shouldn’t have been such a surprise.

I remembered what I was there for, and I called out through the open door. “Dad?”

When he didn’t answer, I went out onto the landing. It was just my house, totally ordinary and basically exactly as it was.

“Dad!” I called again, crossing to his own bedroom.

I opened the door and peeped in. He had a strange bed in there, that I’d never seen before. It wasn’t his, and I knew he and Mom had bought that when they got married. Maybe it was whatever he’d slept in before that. It looked old fashioned, and the sheets were flat and neat and perfect. Like in a hospital.

There were black and white photos on the walls, of people I didn’t know. Some of them looked familiar. Maybe I’d seen them in the big family album downstairs. I didn’t go into the room, but nothing about it looked familiar. Not the dresser, or the big green jewellery box on it, not the blue wallpaper or the brown sheets or anything. It was the room Dad slept in, but it wasn’t Dad’s room.

Then I wondered if maybe that was the way his mother had it. She died well before I was born, but I thought Dad had said once that she slept in that room when he was young. His father too, probably. Dad’s childhood bedroom was my room.

I checked the spare room, finding it much the same as we’d always had it. The bathroom too. Maybe that meant Dad didn’t have any strong associations with those rooms, so they just looked the way he was currently familiar with.

I called out to him again as I went down the stairs, but there was no answer. Then I heard a scream. It was high-pitched and piercing and seemed to be coming from everywhere. Then there was another, like someone had paused to take a breath before starting again. Another and another, they kept screaming as I ran through the hall and into the living room, through to the kitchen.

“DAD!” I called again, but it couldn’t be him screaming, could it? His voice didn’t sound anything like that. This was a woman, or maybe even a child.

A child screaming?

Standing in the kitchen, and looking through the window, I saw again that it was snowing outside and I realised exactly what this nightmare was.

I hurried out the back door and into the yard, ignoring the snow, surrounded by the sound of myself screaming. Even though it seemed to be coming from all around me, I knew exactly where I’d be. At the back of the scrapyard, behind the big truck, where I wouldn’t be seen from the house.

Just as my father must have done that Christmas morning in 1985, I raced around the side of the truck. Unlike him, I didn’t have a gun, but I was ready to deal with that demon in my mother and the other one, the man with the strange golden eyes.

But then I stopped dead, before I turned the corner. I felt sick at the sound of my toddler self screaming, and I hesitated. I didn’t want to see it. I couldn’t look at myself, just a baby, being bled by monsters. I had nightmares enough as it was!

But this was Dad’s nightmare, and at least when I had them, I could wake up. He needed my help.

“Dad!!!” I hollered, turning round the corner.

He was there alright, and so was Uncle Rufus. They both looked their current age, though they would have looked very different that day, when they had first met. I saw the male demon running away too, but he didn’t look at all like I remembered him.

Uncle Rufus gave chase as the screaming stopped. I looked around for myself. But I was gone. Maybe because I was there. Perhaps Dad’s dream couldn’t account for me as an adult and a child at the same time, so it just removed the child.

But mom was there. She was lying in the snow, soaked red in a huge perimeter around her, though surely there can’t really have been that much of it. It was probably a symbol, rather than an accurate memory. Could it be a blood puddle representing the size of Dad’s guilt?

He was kneeling in the snow beside her, clutching onto her hand.

“Karen! Karen… I’m sorry… I had to…”

I ran over there right away. How many times had he relived this?

“Dad! Daddy!”

Kneeling down beside him, I grabbed his shoulders and turned him towards me. “Dad! It’s me. It’s Ellie!”

“Ellie… What are you… You were over…” He looked around, searching for the injured, screaming me he had been dreaming of.

“It’s not real!” I said. “It’s a dream. Remember?”

“Ellie?”

But it wasn’t Dad that spoke. It was Mom. Her voice sounded weak and strained, and no wonder, with the two bullet holes in her chest, still bleeding into the snow.

“I… Mom?”

Dad was holding one hand, but she reached out the other towards my face. I knew it wasn’t her. It wasn’t my Mama. Not really. Just a memory of her. But it felt real and I shook as she touched my cheek.

She smiled. “She grew up so pretty, Bobby.”

Still gripping her other hand, Dad was sobbing. “Yeah… Yeah she did.”

I put my own hand over hers, as she ran her fingers across my face. It had stopped snowing, and when I looked up for a moment, I saw we were no longer in the yard. We were outside still, but it was sunny, and there was grass everywhere.

I heard laughter behind me, and turned to see children, climbing all over a playground. It was the park I used to like when I was little. The one near Mrs Dalton and Jody’s house. They used to take me all the time when I stayed there. Sometimes Dad took me too.

I felt my Mom’s hand again, and I looked back down, but she wasn’t on the ground anymore. She was sitting upright, kneeling opposite me. Still with one hand on my face, she was smiling, though the bullet wounds in her dress had not stopped bleeding. It was a surreal kind of bleeding, that just flowed from her chest without ever seeming to go anywhere. Her pink dress was all stained, but the stains didn’t get any bigger.

Beside us, Dad was staring. I could see in his face that he knew something wasn’t right about it.

“Ellie…”

“Dad, you’re… this is a dream. You’re in danger and you need to wake up.”

“How old are you now?” Mom asked. “You look so grown up.”

“I’m twenty-five,” I told her, without even thinking. My memories of her face were not that clear, and I’d only gotten to really look at her in photos. I did look sort of like her, though not nearly as beautiful. We had the same big eyes, but not the same colour.

Mom smiled. Her voice was so soft and kind. “What do you do? Have you been to college? Are you married? Do you have kids? Tell me…”

She wasn’t my real Mom. My Mom would want to know all those things, but this wasn’t her. This was just the echo of her in my Dad’s memory and I needed to wake him up.

Only… her smile was so beautiful and her eyes so kind and she loved me. My only memory of her was not even her. This was what she’d really been like and I wanted to tell her everything.

“I went to Wisconsin State,” I told her. “Linguistics and Latin. Got a GPA of 3.6. But I’m not married.” I shrugged. “Kinda suck at the whole love thing.”

“I’m so proud of you,” she said, turning to Dad. “Bobby, you did good. You did so good.”

I couldn’t help it. I hugged her. She held me back and I wished it wasn’t a dream, because I couldn’t smell her and I couldn’t really  _feel_  it. Not like a real hug. But I stayed there anyway.

“I’m so proud of you both,” she said again, letting me go. “What kind of job do you do?”

“I’m a Hunter,” I said. “Like Dad…”

Without any warning, she opened her mouth wide and a long, guttural scream emerged. I shuffled back, startled and Dad looked very alarmed. She turned on him, and the scream stopped. But what came out of her mouth was not not the same sweet, loving voice of my mother. It was a deep, rasping snarl.

“Bobby Singer, you promised me! You promised me!”

Dad was shaking. “Karen, I tried… she wouldn’t…”

“I DIDN’T WANT THAT LIFE FOR HER!!!” she growled.

Her hands reached towards Dad’s neck and he made no attempt to defend himself, as she wrapped her fingers around his throat. I sat there, frozen. She didn’t want what life for me?

“You read my journal,” she said, as her fingers began to dig in, Dad’s neck going red beneath her touch. “You knew I wanted to protect her. How could you do this?!”

Do what? Let me become a Hunter? How could Mom have wanted to protect me from that, she didn’t know anything about it? Dad didn’t become one until after she died.

“Ka…” Dad was gagging, trying to get her name out.

I started as I came back to myself. Could she really hurt him? I got hold of her wrists and pulled her hands away from him

“You fucked up, Bobby!” she hissed, even as I forced her away. “You fucked up!”

“I know,” he said, gasping for air. “I know…”

“Dad!” I screamed. “Dad! This is  _not_ real! She’s not real! You gotta wake up!”

He seemed to notice me again, looking at me closely.

“Ellie?”

Still trying to hold my mother back, I shouted at him over her snarls and screams.

“You are asleep! You’re dreaming! WAKE UP!”

“A dream…” he muttered.

Mom was starting to overpower me, still reaching out to strangle my father, as the blood from her wounds started pouring out thicker and faster.

“Dad! Wake up!”

Just as she slipped from my grip, I opened my eyes, sitting up with a jolt. I was in the motel room. Sam was sitting beside me, and Dean was over at the table. He stood up and in seconds, they had hold of my shoulders either side of me.

“Ellie? What happened? You okay?”

“I… It worked…” My head was still reeling from what had happened. Why had my mother attacked my father? And with such ferocity. “He’s awake… I think…”

I tried to remember what had been said. I’d been talking to the Dream Mom, because she’d asked about my life and what I did. I told her I was a Hunter, and she went berserk.

“Call the hospital,” Sam told Dean. “See if he’s awake. Ellie, what’s wrong? You’re shaking. Did something hurt you in there?”

_You promised me_ , she’d said.  _I didn’t want that life for her_.

What promise? What life?

_You read my journal_ …

Dad had never, in twenty-two years, said anything about my mother having a journal. If such a thing existed, he had never even hinted at it. Why wouldn’t he tell me? I’d have loved to read a journal of my mother’s.

“What journal?” I said aloud.

Sam had both arms around me. “It’s okay,” he said. “Whatever you saw in there, it’s over now…”

I blinked at him, barely able to take in his face.

“What journal?”


	66. Chapter 65: The Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie confronts Bobby about his nightmare. And for the first time, she gets the truth. All of it.

The hospital staff thought it was an incredible coincidence that Dad woke up just before Dean called to check in on him. What were the chances, they wondered.

Though it was four in the morning, they said that under the circumstances, it’d be okay for us to come in. Sitting in the back of the Impala, my mind was buzzing. I was more awake than any coffee could ever make me.

It was a twenty minute drive, and apart from answering Sam’s questions every time he checked in, I spent the whole time going back over what I’d seen in Dad’s dream.

Hearing myself screaming was disturbing. I doubted that the real three-year-old me had hollered quite that long and that loud, but I supposed that was how it had felt to my father, as he was woken by it and then struggled to find me and help me. I knew he had a lot of guilt about shooting my mom while she was possessed. So it made sense to me that he dreamed of her with bullet wounds, even while she was apparently alive and happy.

I knew that what Dad dreamed of that Christmas morning wasn’t entirely accurate. The demon that ran away looked completely different to the one I remembered. Plus, in the dream Uncle Rufus chased him, whereas in reality, he had let him run and stayed to exorcise my mother while Dad took care of my wounds. For the purposes of the nightmare, I supposed the core of it all was me and Mom, so that was what Dad dreamed about. I wondered still if me appearing was the reason the baby me had disappeared from the dream. Perhaps Dad couldn’t take in the concept of two of me.

Then there were the things my dream mother had said. All of it made sense at first. It wasn’t hard to imagine that if she were alive, Mom would want to know what I was like and if I was happy. I could believe she’d be proud of my Dad too, since he once told me he’d been really scared about parenting, even before he lost Mom.

Then the dream got weird.

It occurred to me that Mom screaming and attacking Dad might have been a representation of his own anxieties about me hunting. It probably wasn’t an accurate depiction of what she would actually do. She referred to a promise he’d made, but that didn’t have to be anything he’d said to her while she alive. Promising to protect your kid from monsters seemed like the sort of thing you might do if you’d just lost your wife to them and found yourself suddenly a single father. Dad might have made some sort of promise to himself that he wasn’t going to let me get hurt or involved in that hunting world, and framed it as a promise to Mom.

Everything made sense. Except the part about the journal. She’d said he read her journal and he knew this wasn’t what she wanted for me. I couldn’t make that add up. Was reading a journal some kind of dream symbolism? If so, what did it represent? The only alternative was that Mom had actually left some kind of journal and Dad really had read it. A new mother might write about her hopes and dreams for her baby. But then Dad would surely have shown it to me.

Unless there was something in there he thought would be way too distressing for me to read?

But what could that be?

All these thoughts were at the back of my mind when we walked into Dad’s hospital room. He was sitting up in bed, still with the monitors attached, but his eyes were open and he looked towards us as we came in. I ran right to him.

“Dad!” I called, putting my arms around him, and thrilled by the strength in his own grip as he held me.

He let me go, with a hand in my hair and a kiss on my forehead. “You… Was that really you?” he asked.

Satisfied he was alive and awake and really himself, I sat down beside him. “Yuh huh. I took some of that Dream Root stuff.”

He frowned as he nodded. “Good thinking. Uh…” He seemed to notice Sam and Dean, then. “So… I guess you figured out about Jeremy.”

“Jeremy?” asked Dean. “That stoner kid? He did this?”

“I saw him a bunch of times,” Dad said, gesturing towards his head. “I didn’t know I was dreaming, but I’ll bet he was behind it.”

Sam was going through the notes we’d brought with us. “You said he had a dorm room, right? We gotta go pick him up, before he skips out.”

“Right,” Dean agreed. “I remember the place. Come on, Sammy.” As Sam made to follow him, Dean turned back. “Glad you’re okay,” he said to Dad.

Sam nodded. “Yeah. Good to see you awake, Bobby.”

Then they were gone, and I heard their heavy footsteps halfway down the hall. It was pretty quiet on the ward that early in the morning and the night staff were still on. I got up, crossed over to the door, and looked both ways, at the boys’ retreating backs in one direction, and a long empty corridor in the other. Then I came back inside and shut the door.

Dad watched as I picked up Sam’s wad of notes, set them down next to my chair and then sat down. He still said nothing as I pulled my chair up to the bed, shuffling closer to Dad.

“So… “ I said.

He frowned at me, and it was difficult to say what was going through his mind.

“So… uh… I wouldn’t let the boys go in, because I wanted to protect your privacy and all.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Anyway… I… I get little me screaming, and I get why Mom was there and why she looked the way she did. And I get that maybe you worry she’d be upset with you because hunting is dangerous or whatever.”

“I don’t need counselling, kid. It was a nightmare. He dug up my fears. It’s done now.”

He either wanted to avoid the subject, or he really didn’t understand what was bothering me about the whole thing. Dad had never been particularly chatty when it came to discussing the things he wanted or feared, but he wasn’t secretive either. He’d been honest with me since I was eight, and I’d always appreciated that. But he didn’t tell me any more than he felt comfortable with, and that was okay. I wasn’t his therapist.

“I’m just confused… What promise was she talking about?”

Dad sighed. “There was a little time,” he said. “Before she died. And I promised to keep you safe. That’s all.”

That sounded plausible enough. “But, what did she say about a journal? She said you read her journal. What does that mean?”

“Ellie, maybe this isn’t the right time…”

“So… there is a journal?” I asked. If there wasn’t, wouldn’t he just say so?

Dad just frowned at me again. “There’s a journal. But maybe this is something we should talk about later.”

Then, all of a sudden, I was mad. Later? Is that what he told himself when I was little? We’d talk about it later? And then again when he told me the truth, when I was eight. He must have decided the journal was for later… And then I got to be a teenager and I asked Dad all those questions about Mom, and he showed me her drawings and some of their love letters, and lots of photos. He must have decided on telling me about this journal later then too.

“Later?!” I asked. “Later? I asked you over and over about Mom! I read those letters of hers til I could recite them by heart! You want to wait for the right time to talk about it? It’s been twenty two years, Dad! When are you expecting the right time to happen?!”

He reached out to from the bed to put his hand on my elbow as my arms flailed in front of me, powered by my fury and entirely out of my control.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You’re right. Okay.”

I was so surprised to be told I was right that I stopped shouting and waving my arms and took a deep breath. I sat back in my chair again, and just looked at my father, waiting.

He looked around the room, at the drip bag, at the door, at his hands. Not at me.

“When your Mom… After the demon was gone… before she died. There was time. You were gonna be okay, but you were out so I held her hand and held onto you at the same time.”

Dad had never told me this part before. I had always assumed the gunshots had killed her on impact, so as soon as Uncle Rufus finished the exorcism, she was dead.

“What did she say?”

“She told me the thing inside her was a demon. And she said it didn’t know much about the ritual they used you for. But it did know that it had to be you. That was why it took Karen. We weren’t unlucky. It was you.”

I stared at him. Me?

I’d never closely analysed my memory of that morning before, and I wasn’t sure how accurate it was. But that senior demon, the one in the man with the yellow-tinged eyes. He’d said something about “ _It’s not what she is, it’s what she’s going to be_.”

“What… why… why me? I was just a normal kid…”

Dad didn’t answer.

“Wasn’t I?”

“You were, but… “ Then he stopped. “Wait… let me tell it in order. Your Mom didn’t have a lot of time, but she told me that you weren’t just a random kid. They needed you specifically. Then she told me I had to protect you. And I promised, but she said I didn’t know how.”

“You didn’t know how?” I asked. What could she have meant? “Because… Cos you didn’t know anything about demons?”

He nodded. “She said Rufus would tell me everything. Made him promise to help me…”

Wait,  _what_?  _“_ Mom knew Uncle Rufus?”

“She said I’d need three things. Listen to Uncle Rufus, read her journal, go see her mother.”

He waited there, maybe thinking I’d interrupt again, but I didn’t have any words. My mother knew Rufus? And she kept a journal that would teach Dad about demons? That was adding up to one obvious, ridiculous conclusion…

“Told me where to find her journal,” said Dad. “Said she loved us. It wasn’t my fault. And then she remembered. Said she’d written it all in the journal, but I needed to tell John what she’d found. He’d try to contact her, and I’d have to tell him.”

John? Who was John? Not…

“John  _Winchester_?”

Dad looked me in the eyes, finally. And just nodded, once.

Then there was a silence between us. The truth was clear and Dad knew I knew, but neither one of us wanted to voice it for the first time.

At last, I calmed my mind enough to speak, but it was only just more than a whisper. “Was Mom a Hunter?”

“No,” Dad said. “Her daddy was. I told you it was his prostate killed him, cos that’s what she told me. It was actually a trio of vampires, on a job in Wisconsin.”

“WHAT THE FUCK!?”

It came out all of a sudden, out of nowhere. I’d been in a sort of calm, weird fugue state, trying to take it all in and then there it was… the rage.

“Ellie…”

“How the hell could you lie to me like this!? What else don’t I know?!”

“I was try…”

But I didn’t even let him finish. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?! Mom knew John Winchester?! And she knew Uncle Rufus?! And a pair of fucking demons picked me for their creepy-ass ritual for a  _reason_  and you never thought that was worth telling me about?! That didn’t seem like information I needed to know, huh?!”

“Ellie!” Dad scolded. He gestured towards the door. “Keep your damn voice down, girl!”

I realised I was standing up. When did that happen? I closed my eyes for a moment, breathed in and out a few times and then sat down. Even then, I still needed to breathe some more to calm myself.

“What did Mom need you to tell John?” I asked. I was three and a half when it all went down, which made Sam about two and a half, so John had only been hunting two years maximum.

“It was all in the journal,” said Dad. “Your Mom didn’t want the life. She wanted to get married and have kids. But she was always good at doing the research for her daddy, and she would still do the odd bit here and there. And not always just for him. There’d be something, now and then, from hunters who were into something really deep. I guess that’s how John found her. Someone told him your Mom could help him.”

“Help him?” I asked. “Because of what happened to Sam’s mom?”

“Yeah… She was looking into Mary’s death for him.”

“And did… um… did she find anything?”

“She’d figured out it was a demon, and that a few other women had died the same way. Always in the nursery, so she thought it had something to do with Sam.”

“She was right,” I said, amazed and shocked and… sorta proud. My Mom had figured out a key piece of the puzzle and Sam and Dean had no idea. But the information John had that helped him track down that yellow-eyed demon guy… Part of that came from Mom!

“She was,” Dad said, and for just a moment, he smiled.

“Can I see the journal?” I asked.

“It’s at home,” Dad said, without much enthusiasm.

“So… can I go home and get it?”

He sighed. “If you really want to.”

“Of course I want to!” I said, angry again. “I can’t believe you hid it from me! Why?”

“Because your Mom didn’t want you hunting. She didn’t want you having anything to do with that life. If she hadn’t died she’d have kept it hidden from me too.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I hated my Dad trying to meddle in my life and tell me I couldn’t do what I had always wanted to do. Somehow when it was Mom, though… It was different. Like somehow the fact I’d never known her gave her more right to decide these things for me. And that made no sense.

And as unfair as it was, part of me was suspicious. Dad didn’t like me hunting, so how could I be sure “this isn’t what your Mom wanted” wasn’t some new ploy to guilt me into quitting?

I immediately bit back that thought! Dad wouldn’t do that. He’d do a lot of things to get his way, but he’d never do that. At least… I’d always thought lying about Mom was something he wouldn’t do. But I was pretty damn wrong about that.

I decided to change the subject, out of fear I’d say something I would regret later.

“So… this ritual thing? I… Do I remember that accurately?”

“What do you remember?”

I told him about the demon possessing my mother and how it had dragged me around the corner and met the other demon. I told him what I could remember of their conversation. She had told him I was a brat, and he had smiled at me. He said it wasn’t what I was, but what I was going to be. He told me I was special. Then he dabbed something on my face in some kind of pattern, and after that there was the pain and I passed out.

“I don’t know what it was,” said Dad. “We’ve both looked and I can’t find any ritual that matches what they did to you. And the weird part… We got you inside and patched you up and Rufus looked you over. He didn’t think it was meant to kill you.”

It had sure felt like I was dying, but I was three years old and scared. That demon had definitely used a knife on me, but I was just a baby and it was traumatic, so maybe my own perception of the situation was not so accurate.

“It wasn’t?” I asked.

Dad nodded. “I don’t think we can know that. Not when we interrupted them. Maybe something would have happened after. But the damage done to you when I got to you wasn’t even enough for me to take you to the ER.”

Without even thinking about it, I’d been running my hand over my belly. I had the faintest scar there, so old and so light you’d never know it was there unless I said so.

“It scarred me…”

“I know,” Dad said, with a frown. “And if you’d gone on bleeding, I’d have lost you eventually. But it would have been very slow. Maybe they never finished what they started. I just don’t know.”

“What about Mom’s journal?” I asked. “Was there anything in there that might…”

He shook his head. “No. Whatever it was about, your Mama had no advance warning of it. The last pages are all about John and Sam.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d kind of hoped this journal of Mom’s might blow the whole ritual thing wide open. I didn’t like thinking about it, but it’d be worth it if I could get some kind of explanation.

I changed the subject not long after that, but even as we discussed Jeremy the dreamwalker and what Dad knew about him, I couldn’t quite get my mind off my mother. All this time, she had been the daughter of a Hunter. She knew about demons and ghosts and about what the life was, and she’d chosen to reject it. Or partially, at least. She’d wanted to keep me safe and away from it.

But she hadn’t, because demons had chosen me for something. I didn’t even know where to start coming to terms with that. I’d always figured I was just a random kid, the unlucky victim of some kind of virgin blood-letting thing. I was mad about Dad keeping things from me but maybe, in this specific detail, he was right not to tell me. It was me.  _Me specifically_. Whatever they were doing, they couldn’t have used some other little girl. There was something special about me.

I guess I had heard them say that, but I’d been three years old and even though I remembered the words, I didn’t really understand them at the time, and I was so young and so distressed that afterwards, I never really trusted my own memory.

Why me?

What did they need from me and why was I the only one who could provide it? And if I did remember accurately, than it had nothing to do with me as a child, but was about what I was going to become. But what I’d become was a perfectly ordinary adult. I hunted demons and shit like that, but so did plenty of people. It didn’t make me  _special_.

By the time Sam and Dean came back, I was sitting in silence, wondering what the hell a demon would ever want with me. Dad had been looking through the notes again, but he heard the boys come in too, and we both looked up.

“Stoner boy wasn’t in his dorm,” Sam said. “We’re guessing he’s long gone by now.”

“He ain’t much of a stoner,” Dad said.

The Winchesters shared a surprised look. “No?” asked Dean.

“No,” Dad said. “Kid’s a full-on genius. Hundred and sixty IQ. Which is saying some, considering his dad took a baseball bat to his head.”

He’d already told me the story, and I rifled through the notes, looking for the ID picture we had for the delightful man.

“Here’s Father of the Year,” I said, pulling it out and handing it to Sam. He frowned as he looked at the picture.

“He died when Jeremy was nine,” I said.

“Injury gave him Charcot-Wilbrand,” explained Dad. “He hasn’t dreamt since.”

Dean had peeked over my shoulder as I put the page back in the file, but now he looked to Dad. “How’d he know how to dig up your nightmares and throw ‘em at you?”

“Hey, he was rooting around in my skull. God knows what he saw in there.”

It had occurred to Dad and I that Jeremy must have been watching when I entered the dream, because he was able to adapt it to my presence, and to know what I said to the dream of my mother.

“Yeah, but how’d he get in there in the first place?” Sam asked, which was a good point. I hadn’t even thought of that. “Isn’t he supposed to have some of your hair, your DNA or something?”

“Yeah. We had to put your hair in the stuff I drank!”

There was a definite pinkness to his cheeks as he answered. “Yeah… Before I knew it was him, he offered me a beer. I drank it. Dumbest friggin’ thing.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It wasn’t that dumb,” said Dean, with a very awkward sort of laugh.

I looked up at him. “Oh Dean, no!”

“You didn’t…” Sam muttered.

“I was thirsty?” Dean said, trying it out to see how it sounded.

“Well, that’s just great!” I moaned.

“Now he can come after either one of you,” sighed Sam.

Dean shrugged, very casual, given the situation. “Well… we just have to find him first.”

“We better work fast,” said Dad, looking over at Dean with a frown. “And coffee up. Because the one thing we cannot do is fall asleep.”


	67. Chapter 66: Anticlimax

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When it comes to the end of the case, well… Ellie kinda slept through it. But to be fair, so did Sam and Dean…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would have had this chapter ready a lot earlier except a) it’s HARD to write Ellie in when the whole thing happens inside Dean’s head. And b) Minecraft is super addictive and I’ve fallen off the wagon. I wish I could have made this chapter better, but I already took ages and rewrote and basically, I feel like a further delay will not involve a corresponding increase in quality, alas. Maybe someday, I will rewrite the whole lot to be way awesomer!!!

I was pissed at Dad and he knew it. When his confused Doctors declared him all clear and discharged him, we decided to split up and search for Jeremy. Dad said he and Dean would check out some of the possible places on campus the kid might go. Figures. Team “Don’t talk about anything important ever cos feelings are for wusses” hanging out and focusing on hunting.

Well, whatever. I was happy to check out some places in town with Sam, and took the keys to Dad’s truck without complaining. Sam drove and we spent the morning searching motels where someone might hole up to avoid being found. Dean called in a few times but it didn’t seem like they were having any more luck than us.

I tried to keep my mind on the job, but it was hard. We were just driving from place to place with a picture of Jeremy and a canvas like that doesn’t take up a whole lot of space in your brain. Either someone had seen him or they hadn’t. I did my best to look for the little tells that might suggest someone was lying, but nothing stood out.

I lost track of time, but in the early afternoon, Sam took us through a drive-thru. I’d forgotten about food completely. I held our lunch bags, wondering why we didn’t just go in for a quick meal, but Sam took a few turns and eventually pulled over at a park.

It was mostly just an open grass area, with a smallish sort of kids playground. There was a group of youngish guys playing with a soccer ball, but it wasn’t a proper game or anything. There were only two other cars, both of them empty and there were no kids on the playground. It was a school day, and the equipment looked kind of old and crappy anyhow.

I was about to pass Sam his food, but he got out of the car and, curious, I followed. By the time I had my shit together, he was sitting on the hood. It was pretty roomy up there and I’d once laid down flat to kill some time working on my tan. It was high though, so I handed Sam the lunch bags while I hoisted myself up.

When I was ready and comfortably leaning against the windshield, Sam shuffled back and handed me my burger. He settled the extra large fries between us and grabbed his fork and his salad. Then he crumpled up the paper bags and shoved them behind his back where the wind wouldn’t blow them away. He took the lid off his salad, slipped it underneath the container and held both together.

“Okay,” he said, as he gathered some lettuce and tomato onto his fork. “What’s up?”

“Huh?” I asked, burger halfway to my mouth, a little juice dripping onto my left hand. “I’m okay.”

Sam just looked at me, one little concerned dimple on his left cheek. “You sure?” he asked. “Cos, we’re just sitting here eating lunch, so, you know… if something was bothering you, now would be a good time to tell me about it. If you wanted to.”

I couldn’t help but smile. He was so sweet, and he could see through me like I could see through the greasy wrapper on my burger. Bit fuzzy, but you can still tell what you’re looking at.

“We’re on a job,” I said.

“Well, I could probably think about finding Jeremy and whatever you’re upset about at the same time. I’m one hell of a multitasker.”

I laughed. “You’re a dork is what you are!”

“Maybe,” he said.

I took another couple of bites of my burger, while the two of us sat side by side, looking at the guys playing soccer. A woman emerged from a street nearby, with two children in tow. I assumed they were children, anyway, though they looked more like a pair of coats with legs and bobble hats. They ran to play on the crappy equipment, while the woman sat down to watch. They were too far away to hear us, but I could hear the children laughing.

“So… I saw something in Dad’s dream. And… well, then we talked about it.”

“Okay,” Sam said.

“Did you know my mom knew your dad?”

His fork stopped halfway to his mouth, a piece of lettuce dropping off and back into the bowl. “What?”

So I told him everything. About how my grandfather never had no prostate cancer and the vampires, about my mother quitting hunting but still having a reputation for knowing stuff about obscure demons. I told him about the journal, and that my mother’s dying words had been used to make sure my father told his father what she’d learned. I told him how Dad had lied to me my whole life, and how those demons that hurt me as a child didn’t pick me at random.

He’d finished his salad by the time I was done, and I’d finished my burger. I’d shuffled a little closer so I could keep my voice lower, just in case the woman with the kids could hear the odd word. I held the fries and we ate them slowly, taking one each at a time.

“So… I noticed something when you first told us the story,” he said, after a brief silence. “Uh… You said your mom’s eyes went black, but the other demon, the guy, his never did?”

“Not that I remember…”

“It’s just… you said there was something funny about his eyes that freaked you out. That they looked kind of yellow or gold.”

“I always figured it was my imagination. Or the host had some kind of eye disease…”

“Or… Ellie, I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but… Maybe it was Azazel. Never did find out why he had yellow eyes instead of black…”

I had been about to grab another fry, but I stopped, staring stunned at Sam. “That… It’s never occurred to me. Oh my God, Sam!”

“It just seems like a pretty weird coincidence…”

“Sam!” I shouted much louder than I’d been intending to. The woman by the playground turned to look at us, then turned back around as one of the kids let off a loud screaming giggle. “Holy shit,” I muttered, lowering my voice again. “Shit…”

“But what does it mean?” he asked. “He obviously didn’t make you drink… you know… what he did to me. But it’s funny he said you were special. That’s what he called me and he others:  _Special Children_.”

“I don’t know if he used that exact word,” I said. “I don’t remember it so well. But Dad was clear about it. Mom said it had to be me, not just any kid. But she didn’t know why. And I remember him saying it was about what I was going to be? What am I going to be, Sam?”

He sighed. “I don’t know, Pea. Maybe nothing. We killed the yellow-eyed bastard and ended that whole thing. So… maybe whatever he wanted you for, it’s not gonna happen.”

“Maybe,” I said, not sure why his logic wasn’t reassuring me. It should have. It made sense that since Azazel was dead, all his plans were void.

“So… you want to go home when we’ve finished with Jeremy?” he asked. “Get that journal?”

“Yeah,” I said. There were only a few fries left and when they were gone, we’d have to get back in the car and back to work.

I watched the two coats with legs running around the playground. The bigger one was playing some sort of game where they tried not to touch the ground. That’s what it looked like from where I was. The little one kept going down the slippery slide and then running round to climb back up again. Over and over.

“Dad says Mom just wanted my life to be normal,” I said. “Normal kid stuff. She quit that life to keep me away from it. Only… it’s the fact she died got me into it…”

“It’s that not at all funny kind of irony,” said Sam and I nodded.

“You like kids?” I asked, not really sure why.

He considered the question as he ate another fry. “Yeah. I’m not one of those “kid people”. I don’t seek them out, exactly. But most of the time when I meet one I like ‘em. Kids are cool. They’re honest and they’re innocent and they’re still hopeful, you know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I love kids. Not even sure why. Watching kids play just makes me feel happy. Probably just hormones or something.”

“No, I get it,” he said. “The kids are happy, so that makes you happy. Maybe it makes you feel nostalgic or something.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking into the cup as I took out the second last fry. “Maybe.”

“Kids like you,” he said, with a shrug. “They always come up and talk to you when we’re working a job. You must give off some kind of vibe.”

“Secret kid-attracting radio signals,” I suggested.

Sam was taking the last fry out of the container. I grabbed the bags and wrappers from behind his bag and crumpled everything together. Then I made him hold it all while he chewed. I slipped off the hood, retrieved all the trash and ran it over to the nearest trashcan.

When I came back, Sam had opened the driver’s side door and was ready to go.

“Where next?” I asked. “Holiday Inn?”

“I guess,” he answered, with a shrug. “Why don’t you call Bobby, see how they’re doing.”

“Can do,” I said, giving him a salute before jumping into the truck.

He used his height advantage to easily slip into the driver’s seat. He turned on the ignition and I turned down the radio as we pulled out of the lot.

“Hey Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

He didn’t need to ask what for. He just smiled at me, that beautiful, genuine dimpled smile that lit up his face, and the truck and the whole goddamn galaxy, frankly.

“You’re welcome.”

* * *

When we got back to the motel that night, none of us had achieved anything. Jeremy was in the wind. I threw myself down onto Dean’s bed in frustration, figuring since he wasn’t allowed to use it, I might as well have a comfy place to hate the world and everyone in it for a few minutes.

There was a discussion about ordering pizza, but I barely participated. My mind was still elsewhere. Dean was cleaning his guns again, a sure sign of stress. Dad was looking through Doctor Gregg’s notes about Jeremy. Sam was flicking through his father’s journal.

After about twenty minutes, I was thinking about getting back up to get my book instead of feeling sorry for myself. I had thought Sam was looking for something that might be relevant to the case, but he stood up and came over to me.

He sat beside me on the bed, and waited for me to shift myself upright. Then he slid the leather-bound book to me, gesturing to a paragraph. Having done that, he got up and turned on the TV.

“Might as well watch the news,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Good thinking,” said Dad.

I looked down at the book, and to the page Sam had indicated.

_January 9th 1986_

_Rang to check in with Karen. Her husband answered. I was about to claim wrong number when he asked if my name was John. I told him it was. He explained Karen had died, but that he had her journal. I’m going to meet him, so he can show it to me. This is all as new to him as it once was to me._

_Such a tragedy about Karen. Demons, apparently. I didn’t get all the details, but he said the little girl was hurt too. She’s not that much older than Sam._

That was it. It wasn’t an entry with any particular interest in it, so Sam and Dean must both have read it over a thousand times without really taking it in. It was one of those entries that contained no information about specific hunts or monsters. It didn’t contain anything useful to them, so they wouldn’t have paid any attention to it.

But Sam must have recalled it and gone looking for it. Now he had the context, it was obviously about Mom. She died on December 25th, 1985. So John had called to check in nearly three weeks later.

It wasn’t the first time I’d read John’s journal and he was pretty dry. Just the facts, which was useful to the boys. But I wondered what he’d really been feeling as he wrote those words. Did he like my Mom? Was he sad to hear she was dead? Did hearing what happened to me add to his concerns about his own kids?

And what had happened when he and Dad met up? Did the information Mom had left behind make sense to John? Was it helpful? Why didn’t he record it in the journal? Sam said nothing relating to the Yellow-Eyed Demon was ever in the journal. Maybe he’d been trying to keep it from Dean, given what he feared about Sam.

I read it through again, but that was it. I skimmed forward several pages, but there was no mention of the meeting with Dad or what had been said there. He’d obviously gotten the info and elected not to write it down, for whatever reason, so the meeting didn’t warrant an entry. If it had, it would only have said something like “ _Met Karen’s husband. Learned secret things._ ” Why bother?

I took the journal over to Dad, who looked up from his notes to see what I wanted. I had barely spoken to him since we got back. I handed him the journal and pointed, feeling Sam’s eyes on us from the other side of the room.

Dad knew what it was, having seen the journal many times. He read over the entry, and his lips moved once or twice, they way they sometimes did when he was very engrossed in reading.

He sat looking at the page for far longer than it would have taken him to read it. Then he handed me back the journal, still open. “After John saw what your Mom wrote about Sam, he thought maybe there was a connection. That maybe they’d come after Sam too. But, I think it was just coincidence. Sam’s thing was a whole other…”

He noticed I was biting my bottom lip. “What?”

“Um… The demon… not the one in Mom. The other one. I remembered he had really weird eyes like I never saw before. Kind of gold or yellow, maybe. And Sam was wondering if maybe it was the same one… That Azazel guy…”

“Wait, what?” Dean asked. He could hear us from over by the table, where all his guns were laid out in front of him.

We waited until the news was over (nothing helpful) and the pizza arrived (why did Sam always order vegetarian if he was just gonna steal my pepperoni? Order something with pepperoni on it, Jesus!). Then we talked about what I’d seen, so that both the guys were up to speed.

We couldn’t do much more than speculate, but Dean promised we’d follow Dad back to Sioux Falls straight after we wrapped up the job. That brought us back around to discussing the job again. We’d tried everywhere we could think of to look for him, but no one on campus had seen him, or at least, that’s what they claimed.

“Well, he don’t look like the popular type,” Dad said. “We put on enough pressure, maybe someone will crack, decide they don’t like him enough to keep lying.”

“I dunno,” said Dean. “If it was me, I wouldn’t tell anyone where I was going.”

“Is Bela still here?” asked Sam.

“I think I saw her car out there,” I said. I didn’t know for sure, but I was fairly confident the little convertible was hers. “Why?”

“Well, remember when she tracked Gordon down for us? He was gone by the time we got there, but the intel was legit.”

“She’s not gonna help us again,” said Dean. “She got us the Dream Root and she’s not exactly our best pal.”

“Can’t hurt to try,” Dad said.

“Maybe you should ask her,” I suggested. After all, she said she was helping because Dad saved her life that time. And he was still in danger. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until we found Jeremy.

The idea of spending more time with Bela was not exactly appealing. She always looked at me with such disdain, and there was absolutely no chance my dirty dream was ever coming true. But if she could help us find Jeremy, it was worth putting up with her stink-eye and the snotty way she called me “Denim”, like it was the same as “Dog Shit”.

Ain’t nothing wrong with denim anyhow. It’s practical and hard-wearing.

* * *

Bela did agree to help. Dad said all he had to do was ask her and she agreed. He didn’t say anything about the whole saving her life thing, but what else would persuade her?

Sam and I decided we’d take turns at staying up with Dad and Dean to make sure they didn’t fall asleep. We could have had Bela take a turn, but I didn’t trust her enough, and Dean agreed. It was better to have her stick to her communing with the spirits thing while we handled the life or death issue.

My watch was first, so I stayed up all night, playing cards with them. We didn’t invite Bela, just let her do her own thing in her own room. She came by at about midnight to report that Jeremy was definitely alive, but she didn’t know more than that. It wasn’t helpful but I supposed she couldn’t help it if her spirit sources didn’t tell her anything. She said she’d try again in the morning.

Sam woke up to take his turn, and I slept most of the day. I had the nightmare about the day my Mom died again, but that was hardly surprising. I woke up with a start, but the others had gone out, so no one saw. I went back to sleep, and mostly it was good and restful.

I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and called Sam, but he said there was still no progress. When they came back, exhausted and with no leads, they brought Bela with them, having met her in the carpark. She said she’d been reading cards and using the Ouija board all day, but who knew if that was true. She ate with us and went to bed, while I stayed up the night with Dad and Dean again.

* * *

It was the most uneventful end to a hunt ever, from my point of view. It all went down the next day, while I was asleep. Sam and Dean had gone out first thing, while Dad, sceptical of Bela’s claims, had her come into our room and take a turn of keeping him awake while she worked with her tarot cards. He said he had it under control, but he’d need me alert that night, so he had me go to bed.

I was woken by Sam at about two o’clock, with the news that Jeremy was dead. Dean, in a sleep-deprived fit of irritation, had decided to stop running and take the fight to Jeremy. He’d deliberately drifted off to sleep, but Sam still had the spare Dream Root potion, so he went into Dean’s dreams as back-up.

“I found him,” Sam explained. “He was in Dean’s dream. I fought him and I… It was weird, Pea. I made him see his father.”

“You made him?” I asked, looking over at Bela, packing up her cards under Dean’s suspicious gaze.

“I don’t know how,” he said. “I just… thought about it and made it happen. I’m not even sure why it killed him…”

“Is it something to do with your psychic thing?” I suggested.

He shook his head, then hesitated. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I haven’t really been able to do that stuff since Cold Oak. Not even had a vision.”

I considered this for a moment and then leant closer into him. “But… it’s still in you, right?” I asked. “Could it be…”

He understood what I meant. I didn’t want to mention the demon blood outright in front of Dean, but Sam was on my wavelength and he just nodded.

“Maybe there’s some kind of residual power… I don’t know. But… I just beat a guy to death with his own memories. And I don’t feel good about it.”

I put a hand over his. “He would have killed Dad and Dean. And you too, probably. And like you said, you don’t know how he died. It’s not like you did it on purpose.”

But he only sighed. “Yeah. I guess.”

Dean escorted Bela back to her room, with a thanks for her help. I watched them go, super conflicted. On the one hand, I couldn’t stand Bela. She was basically evil. On the other hand… I really wanted her to like me. Not like in the dream. I wasn’t deluded. But, normally when someone was a jerk to me, I’d be a jerk right back. It was different with Bela, though, and I didn’t understand why. She didn’t like me and that bothered me somehow.

When Dean came back, he and Dad went right to sleep, leaving Sam and I to spend the afternoon together. We didn’t talk about Sam’s possible retention of psychic power. We didn’t talk about my Mom. We just talked. We played stupid card games, and compared notes on a book we’d both recently read. We laughed about how cranky Dean got when he was tired, and speculated whether he would eventually grow into an exact replica of my father.

We went for a walk. It wasn’t far to a takeout place that had burritos, but we took our time. We didn’t stop or anything, just dawdled, in that liberating way that meant you were done with a case and had no deadlines or urgency. I made us take a detour through a tiny little park I’d seen a few times but never had the time to walk through. It was a pond and some grass and a family of ducks, but it was nice.

Each of us ordered a burrito and we got one each for Dad and Dean, too. Sam carried theirs, but we ate ours as we walked. I thought about going back through the park, so I could give the ducks some flatbread, but I figured we’d better get the burritos back to the others before they got cold.

When we got back, Dad and Dean were both up. Dean was on the phone, just hanging up as we came in.

“You guys seen Bela?” he asked, as I passed him his food. “Thanks… She’s not in her room. She’s not answering her phone.”

“So, she just took off?” I asked.

“Just like that,” said Dean. “It’s a little weird.”

Dad was pulling the wrapper off his burrito before I even had time to shut the door. “Yeah well, if you ask me what’s weird is why she helped us in the first place.”

“You saved her life,” I reminded him.

He looked at me, then at Sam, who nodded. Dean gave a little nod of his own as he chewed.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The thing in Flagstaff,” Dean said.

“That thing in Flagstaff was an amulet. I gave her a good deal, that’s all.”

I wondered if I was remembering it wrong. But no, I was certain Bela had said Dad saved her life when she screwed up in Flagstaff, and by the looks of it, the boys remembered it just the same as I did.

“You boys better check your pockets…” Dad murmured, and a feeling of dread washed over me.

Dean noticed the safe first. It was your typical motel safe, inside the closet, with a code you set yourself and that gets reset when you leave. We always kept the Colt in the safe, wherever we stayed, unless there wasn’t one, in which case it stayed under Dean’s pillow.

Shit. Dean had opened the safe to put the Dream Root in. Bela had seen him do it.

“No no no no…” Dean muttered, crossing over to it as we all watched. No one in that room was breathing while he opened it.

It was empty.

“The Colt…” said Sam. Dean slammed the safe door shut so hard I jumped. “Bela stole the Colt.”

I knew there was a good reason I hated her…


	68. Chapter 67: The Journal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has finally got hold of her mother’s old journal. And she reads it again and again (and again).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final two scenes here were requested by my consultant, Emmy. She pointed out that this would have to happen on occasion and she wanted to know how it would work. I hope the answer pleases her.

_December 18th 1985_

_Sometimes I wonder if it’s right, distancing myself from hunting the way I have. Not because it’s what my father wanted. I know that, in the end, he just wanted me to be happy and I am. But looking into this demon for John has given me pause. Hunting has never been what I wanted, not for me and not for Ellie. I told myself it’s dangerous, that living that life, with those people, would threaten my family. But does it really? John and his wife were never hunters, but the ignorance didn’t protect them, or their little boy. Whatever it was that demon with yellow eyes did to the boy, and to the other children, their parents’ ignorance made no difference. It didn’t save them._

_In the end, maybe I can protect Ellie, and Bobby too, with knowledge, rather than secrecy. If I tell Bobby the truth, and Ellie, when she’s ready, they would be more prepared, have more understanding if something happens. After all, you teach your children about crossing the street and not taking candy from strangers. Is it so outrageous to also teach them about demonic omens and the signs of a haunting?_

_I don’t know what I’ll do. But I can’t stop thinking about what would happen if something like that demon of John’s set its sights on Ellie. I can’t sleep for thinking about my sweet baby girl getting snatched by something. Bobby wants to teach her how to shoot one day. And he’s been talking about karate or something when she’s older. He wants her to know how to protect herself._

_And he’s right, but he doesn’t know what’s out there._

After Bela ran off with the Colt, we spent a few days in Pennsylvania trying to get a lead on her. Dad called everyone he knew, but no one had seen anything of her. Or so they said. Eventually, after much swearing and kicking of inanimate objects he felt had wronged him, Dean admitted defeat.

He hadn’t given up. We were ready to swing into action and kick her ass as soon as we got wind of where she was. But in the meantime, he had promised to take me back home to get my Mom’s journal. I hadn’t intended to hold him to that, under the circumstances, but he didn’t see any reason not to go through with the plan.

And so, a week after learning of its existence, I had the journal in my hands. Dad had kept it in his room, where he knew I’d never go snooping. It wasn’t with the rest of her photos and letters and all the stuff I’d seen before.

Excited as I was to be home for a while and get to sleep in my own bed, I wanted the journal more. Dad knew it. We hadn’t been there five minutes before he came into my room and handed it to me. Then he left without another word.

It was a plain red book with lined paper, like the kind you would have for school. It looked so… non descript. Just an ordinary notebook, and when I opened the cover, I could hardly believe that what I was looking at was this dark, secret thing.

I spent all afternoon with it. Sam came in to say he was going for a run and asked if I wanted to come, like I usually did. I didn’t, and he understood. Dean invited me to come on his beer run and get some food, but I told him I’d eat anything and just drink whatever beer he was getting. I just told him to take cash from my bag and went right on reading.

December 18th, that was the last entry. One week before Mom died and she was wondering whether keeping that part of her life secret would ever really protect me. Or herself. It was almost like she knew, or that she sensed her own death coming somehow. It chilled me to think of her sitting there and writing it, probably with me nearby, playing with my dolls or drawing. Then a week later, a demon took her and she died. But maybe it was just coincidence.

There was stuff in there about John and the yellow-eyed demon and Sam. But it wasn’t anything the boys didn’t already know. John hadn’t always been forthcoming about what he knew, but he had been before he died. Or at least, he’d told them everything my Mom had told him, in bits and pieces.

I was mad. The journal wasn’t  _about_  me. But I was all through it. Even the entries from before I was born were infused with my mother’s dreams and plans and logic. The whole book was half diary and half record of her research, just like John’s was. In fact, I wondered if John’s own hunter’s journal hadn’t been informed a little by what he’d seen in my mother’s, the two styles were so similar.

There I was on every page, all my Mum’s love for me written in thoughtful sentences in between the sketches of symbols and the cold hard demon facts.

_“Dad’s dead. He got in over his head with a vampire nest. Mom’s devastated but she says she’d always figured it would be something like this. I told Bobby it was his prostate and it happened suddenly. It’s a plausible story, because even Bobby knows Dad hated doctors. I just wish he’d been able to meet his grandchild. Mom says he was so excited. He was going to take her shopping for baby shower stuff when he got back from the job.”_

_“It’s happening. The water hasn’t broken yet, but I’ve copied out all my notes for Annie and put them in an envelope for Mom to mail when she gets a chance. Once this baby comes, I’m not going to have any time and I want to do right by Annie and makes sure she has what I was able to get. It’s early but I can definitely feel real contractions. I called Bobby to come home and he should be here soon. Looks like this little one is coming now, and due date be damned! I wonder if this impatience is a sign of things to come.”_

_“Made progress on the Morton case, but Ellie has been fretting. Poor little thing, she’s teething, and that doesn’t leave much time for lore. And I can’t wait until Bobby’s home to look after her. What would I say I’m doing? But Hank will just have to wait, because I told him my family comes first.”_

Those were just some of the little passages my father had gone out of his way to hide from me. That he didn’t think I had a right to see. Yeah, I was real mad.

I read it straight through before dinner, then went back upstairs after to read it a second time. I was up until three reading it. I didn’t sleep well at all, and brought it downstairs with me the next morning. I couldn’t read over breakfast; the thing was old and precious and I didn’t want to get food on it. But I ate my toast quick as I could and then went to sit on the couch in the study.

I didn’t even get out my pyjamas, just sat on the couch all morning, reading it and running my fingers across the pages. Sometimes, when nobody was around, I held it up to my nose and sniffed the pages. The journal smelt old and musty but it was a comforting smell. I knew from the journal what I’d never known before. That Mom liked dusty old books of lore as much as I did, and so that old book smell was right, somehow. I’d always associated the smell of baking pie crust and cherries with Mom, but now she was books too, and that was okay.

After lunch I finished reading the last pages. The book covered five years, with me being born right in the middle. She’d started it after she and Dad got married, because she was researching a demon thing for her father and needed somewhere to keep her notes. There would be periods where she wrote in it almost every day, probably working on the job while Dad was out. Then she’d finish whatever the request was and there’d be a gap, before someone else called her with an obscure creature or a weird set of omens and she’d be back to it. A little less frequent after she got pregnant with me, but no less dedicated.

I was done in plenty of time to make something for dinner. As much as I loved burgers and fries and breakfast burritos, I was pretty keen to eat something that wasn’t prepared in less than five minutes. I was never the world’s greatest chef but I was capable of throwing together a pasta sauce.

Dad came in while I was cooking. He’d approached me several times while I was reading the journal, but my one word answers and refusal to look up gave him the hint and discouraged him from trying to talk to me anymore. I had tried, but every time I looked at him I just felt angry. How could he have hidden so much from me?

“Ellie…” he began, as he came into the kitchen.

I just kept chopping the mushrooms, while I focused on figuring out what I was going to say to him. Sooner or later we were going to have to have the conversation.

“I always figured I was gonna tell you the truth,” said Dad. “And then you grew up, and I told you how your mother really died and you… Do you remember what happened?”

I shook my head as I kept chopping. Since he was behind me I couldn’t tell if he saw or just took my silence as a no.

“I told you I hunted down the monsters like the one that got you and killed your mom. And you said you wanted to help. You asked if you could fight the monsters too one day. And you’ve read the journal. That was the opposite of what she wanted.”

I thought about it. She did write about how she didn’t want me to know about that life, then she second guessed that decision and wondered if maybe it was safer to know the danger. But if I was honest, I supposed there was a difference between being aware of that world and actively hunting.

“Yeah, well she said she wanted to protect  _us_  from that world,” I said. “You too. But you went ahead and got involved so I don’t see how I’m doing anything different.”

Dad sighed. “I’m just trying to explain… I was trying to discourage you from hunting and I figured if you saw that your mother was…”

I understood what he was trying to say, and I interrupted. “So, your justification for lying to me was that you were trying to stop me making decisions for myself? Because that’s not really much of an excuse!”

“It wasn’t like that,” he insisted.

I was cooking so I couldn’t get away from him, and the argument continued through the entire meal preparation. It continued when Dean came in from the garage and when Sam came downstairs. It continued over dinner. It would have carried on through the washing up too, if Sam hadn’t gotten up to do it before anyone else had a chance. He and Dean were both wise enough to stay well away. Whatever they thought they would get on someone’s bad side if they spoke up, so they just kept their opinions to themselves.

In the end, it wasn’t an argument that was ever going to be won or lost. It came down to a fundamental difference of perspective that couldn’t be fixed. Dad thought putting my safety before what I wanted was justifiable and that he’d been doing the right thing as a parent. I thought it was wrong of him to try and control my life, even to protect me. Since neither one of us was changing our mind, we would never stop arguing.

We hadn’t come to any sort of resolution when I went to bed. I just told Dad I was too tired to talk about it anymore, but that was a lie. I took the journal up with me and read some of it before I fell asleep.

* * *

I woke up with my face flat up against the journal. But oddly, I’d had a good night’s sleep. It was the sunlight through my window that woke me and when I checked the clock I found it was going on for nine o’clock. Well rested, but still a little bleary and confused, I went downstairs for breakfast to find Dean in the kitchen.

He grinned when he saw me. “Afternoon, Princess.”

“Funny,” I scoffed, tapping the back of his head in a pretend slap. “And original, too.”

“Well, they do say I’m The Funny One,” he said, still with a smile.

I opened the fridge door and got myself some milk before seeking out the cereal. It was nothing special, just cornflakes, but it was a change from greasy diner food. I had eaten so much grease since joining up with the boys that I was now beginning to understand why Sam always chose the salad.

It turned out I _could_  get sick of pizza.

When I took my bowl into the study with me, Dean followed. Sam was already in there, looking at something on his computer screen, and apparently quite intent on it. As I came in and sat down on the couch, he looked up.

“So, any leads on Bela?” I asked.

Sam shook his head. “No. But I got a possible vengeful spirit in Florida.”

“Well good,” I said. “Let’s saddle up and get out there!”

I saw the boys look at each other, as whatever sub-vocal thing they had going on happened. But neither of them said anything aloud.

Then Dean nodded. “Okay. Florida it is. Start packing up, Sammy.”

I wasn’t resolving my argument with Dad anytime soon, so why not follow the traditional Singer method of dealing with problems and just run away?

* * *

I said goodbye to Dad and I wasn’t lying when I said I would miss him. I promised to keep sending postcards and he said to always remember we could call him about anything. He stood in the yard, watching us drive off.

I was still mad, but that didn’t mean I hated him or anything. I was sure that after a few days away, all my anger would fade and I’d go back to missing him again. But that’s why God invented the cell phone, right?

I read the journal right through twice during the trip. Sometimes I read parts out loud to the boys, just stuff mentioning their father, or parts that were interesting. Mom had done a lot of study about different kinds of demons, and Dean agreed with me that it wouldn’t hurt to know this stuff before we needed it.

We were on some backroad in Missouri when Sam dozed off. I was yawning myself, loudly. After about the fifth yawn, Dean pulled over and nudged Sam awake.

“Sign says we got forty miles to the next backwater,” Dean said.

“You wan’ me t’drive?” Sam asked, through a groggy sleep haze.

“Dude, you sound drunk. You are not getting behind the wheel of my baby. Ellie, you good to drive?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and immediately yawned again, proving that I probably wasn’t. It was after midnight. Any sane person would be in bed.

“Shoulda stopped at that last town,” Sam said.

Dean sighed. “Well, I’m barely staying awake here… “

There was a long pause and I was about to suggest maybe I could take an hour’s power-nap and then drive. Then Sam broke the silence.

“We could always…”

“How’s that gonna work, man? Ellie’s small but she’s not that small.”

“What?” I asked. What was Sam suggesting?

He turned around to face me. “Dean and I used to sleep in the car on nights like this. But, uh… we haven’t since you’ve been here…”

I thought about this for a moment. The Impala had those long wide bench seats, so you could easily fit one in the back and one in the front, if they curled their legs up a bit. I looked around me at the width of the backseat. It wasn’t so small. We could fit two, if they both lay on their sides.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m so tired I could sleep anywhere. I reckon we’d both fit back here, Sam.”

Dean made a grunting sound.

“What?”

“Do I smell bad or something? You automatically assume you’ll be sharing with Sam? That’s flattering, Princess, thanks.”

I leant forward to pop my head between them. “Oh pumpkin, did I hurt your feelings?” Sam smirked as I pet Dean’s hair and made him squirm to avoid my hand. “I figured you wouldn’t want me in your personal space.”

“I might,” he said.

“Okay, then I’ll share with you,” I offered. “Sam’s bigger anyway. Prepare yourself, I’m a cuddler.”

Dean laughed as I made to start climbing over to the front. “No way, I’ve heard your weird sleep squeaks, I don’t want you up here snoring in my face.”

Sam glared at him but I was not offended.

“Maybe you two could share up there and I’ll stay here,” I suggested.

“Good idea,” said Sam. “Move over, Dean…”

“You gotta be kidding,” his brother said, shoving him back.

Sam just laughed at him and opened his door to get out. I did the same, and satisfied that neither of us was going to intrude on his territory, Dean started to lay back.

While he was making himself comfortable, Sam and I stood at the back, door wide open and looking in.

“I’m thinking you get in first,” I said.

He nodded. “If I turn around so my head’s at this end, you can get in and have your head near my feet.”

“Your feet smell?” I asked, with a smile, and he shook his head. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

He climbed in and sat down then turned himself around and lay back. He had to bend his knees quite a bit to fit, but not nearly as much as I would have thought. He shifted himself to make as much room beside him as possible and then gave me the okay to get in.

Careful not to put my hand anywhere painful (or awkward) as I clambered over him, I finally got my head to the right spot. It was surprising how much space there was. I couldn’t help thinking, as I settled down more comfortably, that Dean had definitely had sex back there, probably repeatedly. I wondered if he’d let me borrow the keys sometime. Couldn’t hurt to ask.

I got my feet in, and repositioned them as best as I could with my knees curled, while Sam reached up to shut the door. Success! We were in, and we weren’t completely squashed. I could definitely sleep in reasonable comfort and without causing irreparable spine damage.

“You kids keep it PG back there!” said Dean. He had sat back up to peer over the headrest at us. I gave him my middle finger and shuffled a little so my head wasn’t too close to Sam’s feet.

“You good?” Sam asked.

“Yep. Night Sam.”

“Goodnight Ellie.”

“And screw you, Dean.”

“Screw you too, Princess.”

Our nightly pleasantries completed, I shut my eyes and tried to clear my exhausted mind and let sleep happen.

* * *

“Ellie…” Sam was whispering to me and nudging my legs.

“Hmm… what?” I asked, opening my eyes and looking around.

It took me a moment to adjust and remember why I was all crammed up against Sam in the back of the car. It was still dark out, and I could hear Dean’s deep, even breathing. He was asleep.

“Uh… You…” Sam was speaking very low, obviously to keep from waking Dean. “You keep kicking my face…”

Shit. “Oh, sorry,” I said, very squeaky and very loud. Then, thinking of Dean, I toned it down. “God Sam, I’m so sorry… What can we… I could get some of the blankets, maybe go out…”

“No, it’s freezing out there,” he protested. “Just… Uh… would it bother you if we faced the same way?”

“What, spooning?” I whispered.

“Yeah, I guess… Would you be uncomfortable?”

I shook my head. I’d never be uncomfortable with Sam, no matter what sleeping arrangements we had going on. I trusted him completely, and if the alternative was kicking him repeatedly in the face, friendly spooning seemed like a good thing.

“Nah, I don’t mind. Hang on…”

Doing my very best not to bump the other seat and wake Dean, I sat up in the footwell and then carefully got back up with my feet on the opposite side. Sam squished himself up a little more to make room for me to climb up beside him. Then I curled my legs and lay down, my back to his chest. Because of our height difference, I could feel his chin just above my head.

It was actually more comfortable and I could smell his aftershave, which was kind of woody and pleasant. But there was still one problem.

“Um… where do our arms go?” I asked. Mine were still out in front of me.

“Uh…”

The absurdity of the situation got to me and I let out an accidental giggle. We were just going to sleep, not playing Tetris. It didn’t need to be so awkward and weird.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “We practically live on top of each other anyway. Put your right hand under your head.” I felt him shift until he’d done that. “Now, where’s your left?”

I held out my hand to take his, and then I guided it down to sit on my hip. Taking in the sheer size of his hand, I had a sudden unwanted thought that perhaps this was so awkward because it sort of resembled dreams I occasionally had. His hand was so big and his fingers so long and feeling them spread out across my hip really hammered that home. But those are thoughts for private times, Ellie. They are not needed or appropriate now.

I folded my arms up and put them close to my chest and there we were.

“Comfy?” I asked.

“Actually, yeah,” he said. “This is much better. Thanks.”

“What are friends for?” I asked. “If not for taking up your space and then making it better by letting you spoon them?”

I could tell that made him smile without even being able to see.

“If my hair gets in your face, just move it and give it a warning. You gotta be firm with it, or it’ll take control.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” he whispered.

“I’m serious, Sam, it can smell fear.”

His hand came off my hip for a moment and moved to the top of my head, where he roughed my hair up.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “You’ll wake the beast…”

“Just showing it who’s boss,” he said, and his hand came down to my hip again. “Now all three of us should try and get some sleep.”

“Okay. Goodnight. Again.”

“Goodnight Ellie, goodnight Ellie’s hair.”

I had worried it would be hard to sleep squished up in the back of the car, but it wasn’t hard at all. I just focused on the feel of Sam’s chest rising and falling behind me, and tried to match my own breathing to the same rhythm. I drifted off in no time.


	69. Chapter 68: Heat of the Moment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie wakes up on what seems like a perfectly ordinary Tuesday to her. But Sam is behaving very strangely.
> 
> Episode Guide: This chapter covers most of Episode 3x11: Mystery Spot.

_Heat of the moment, telling me what your heart meant…_

The music woke me up with such a start. I didn’t even hear it really, it didn’t pass through my ears but went straight to my heart, forcing me upright with a jolt of adrenaline.

Dean sat on his bed, pulling worse dance moves than my English teacher at prom. The music was way louder than it needed to be. There’d be complaints from other rooms. Weird that the radio should be playing that exact song though. It had definitely been rattling around in my head for a while. There was such a sense of familiarity to it, like I’d heard it recently. But I didn’t think I had. Maybe it was playing in the car while I slept or something and I absorbed it. It was an okay song but I didn’t need it blared at me at nine million decibels first thing in the morning.

It was rare for Dean to be up before his brother but not totally unheard of. Dean tended to get up as soon as he woke. I admired that, because if I woke up early, I would stubbornly stay in bed until my planned wake-up time and damn the consequences.

But Asia was enough to get Sam out of bed in a way that was almost inhuman. His eyes opened and he bounced out of bed in almost one fluid movement. Before I could even throw my blanket off and get to my feet, Sam was at his bag, grabbing some clothes.

We’d come to Florida on a possible haunting that turned out to be a prank. But then I’d seen a newspaper article about this professor guy’s disappearance a couple counties over. I showed it to the boys and though Dean was sceptical we decided to check it out. We’d arrived in town about five, too late to get any meaningful work done on the case. We’d grabbed something to eat at a Biggersons and gone back to the motel. We watched the news. I read, the boys watched a movie. Everyone was in bed by eleven. Apparently, that was more than enough sleep for Sam.

“Damn, you’re peppy,” I groaned as I forced myself to stand up. “What the hell are you on?”

He turned around and looked at me. His beautiful eyes were at their brownest, and that cute little crinkle was in his forehead. “It’s just… Never mind. It’s not important.” He began rummaging through his bag again, and I felt kind of nervous just looking at him. He seemed to be all energy.

He was like that all morning, impatient, but not pushy about it. He just sat on the end of his bed with a bag, ready to go as soon as we were. He didn’t hurry either Dean or I up, but I could see he wanted to get moving. I did my best to hurry for him, but my hair wasn’t cooperative. Eventually, we were all ready to go and talk about the job over breakfast.

 

* * *

 

 

We’d seen a cute little diner right near the motel, so Dean thought we should go there for breakfast. He liked the diners in these smallish towns and so did I. They always gave big portions and there was usually some fun local speciality on the menu.

We got there and sat down, Sam and Dean side by side and me opposite (which was permitted under Rule 5, even though occasionally people mistook the brothers for a couple).

Dean pointed to a sign on the wall. It was advertising the special breakfast on Tuesdays. “Hey, Tuesday! Pig in a poke!”

“What even _is_ a pig in a poke?” I asked.

Sam was looking over at the counter, his attention apparently fixed on something he saw there. “Look, I gotta tell you guys something. And I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but please just listen, okay?”

“Okay,” I promised, and Dean nodded.

Before Sam could start telling us whatever it was, a waitress came over. She was an older lady with a friendly air about her, and according to her nametag, she was Doris.

“You ready?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dean told her. “I’ll have the special, side of bacon and a coffee.”

I thought about bacon. Then I thought about my increasingly fat stomach. I didn’t know how Dean was able to do it, but I could only eat so much crappy greased up diner food before it started to show.

“I’ll have… um… an egg white omelette. And coffee.” That probably wouldn’t fill me up though. Would it be enough to keep me going through to lunch? Was there any point in eating healthier if I was stuffing myself?

“I’m not hungry,” said Sam, quickly.

“Alright,” said Doris, as I made up my mind to add some toast. “Is there anything else?”

Before I could get my mouth open, Sam was pointing to me. But he was still watching whatever it was that had grabbed his attention. “She wants some whole wheat toast.”

He ordered straight out of my mind exactly what I wanted. And he did it with at least ninety percent of his attention on either another waitress or a guy eating pancakes. It was hard to tell.

Doris was surprised by this, but not nearly as surprised as me. Was Sam having those psychic visions again? Doris looked at me to confirm the order and I just nodded to her, stunned.

“Okay,” she said, with wariness in her voice. “Jelly?”

“Strawberry,” said Sam.

That could have been a lucky guess, because he knew that was my favourite. But how the hell could he have known I wanted toast? And to specifically say whole wheat when I wouldn’t normally order that? I preferred white bread.

When Doris was gone, I leant down low on the table so I could speak quietly.

“How the hell did you do that?” I asked.

“That’s what I need to tell you,” Sam said.

Dean’s jaw clenched a little as he looked at his brother. “Dude, tell me this isn’t some psychic thing…”

“No, it’s not…” He had taken some of his attention off the counter, but he still turned his body in that direction. “I knew Ellie wanted whole wheat toast because that’s what she’s ordered every day for months.”

I shook my head. “Sam… I have barely ever ordered toast and always white…”

“No!” he said firmly. “No. You never remember, either of you. But we have been in this town for months now. Today is Tuesday, and yesterday was Tuesday. But tomorrow won’t be Tuesday, cos I have it figured out.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Yeah you’re definitely not crazy…”

With a glance back at the counter again, Sam tried a different explanation. “I keep reliving today over and over and even when it’s different it’s still basically the same. And we have this conversation every day.”

Sam had said what he wanted to tell us would sound crazy and it sure did. It sounded like he was having some sort of psychotic break… But then… how did he know about the toast? That was pretty weird…

“Everyday, you die,” Sam was telling Dean. “You die, and then I wake up and it’s the same damn day and you die again and again.”

I decided to humour; tell him I believed him and reserve judgement on whether I actually did. As I opened my mouth to speak, he reached into his pocket and handed me a piece of paper from the motel stationary. It was folded over.

I unfolded it and read, in Sam’s handwriting, the sentence I had been about to speak. _“Okay… Let’s assume for a moment that you’re right. How does Dean die, can we do anything to prevent it?”_

I stared at him as I pushed the paper across the table to Dean.

“You… were you gonna say this?” Dean asked.

I nodded. “So, this isn’t like before, when you saw people die before it happened? This is you living through it, and then you wake up and it’s like it never happened?”

“Back to square one, every day,” Sam said. “But not tomorrow.”

The toast thing was weird, but that he could write down the exact phrasing I was going to use… It had to be either psychic premonition or… stuck in time, like he was saying, however nuts that was.

“It’s your psychic thing,” Dean said, dropping his voice a little. “It felt real, but it was just premonitions or whatever…”

Sam shook his head, and then leant back a little as Doris walked between him and whatever he was watching at the counter. I was starting to feel a little insulted. The waitress behind the counter was kind of cute, but I didn’t think she deserved quite so much of Sam’s attention.

Call me jealous, but I’m just saying.

“It’s not premonitions. This is some sort of timeloop,” he said, so matter of fact, like people talked about time loops every day.

“Like _Groundhog Day_?” I asked.

“Yes. You say that everyday.”

“And I die every time?” Dean said. It sounded like he was at least pretending to take things seriously.

“Yes,” said Sam. The waitress had disappeared into the kitchen, but Sam was still staring that way, at either the counter itself, something sitting on it or the pancake man.

“How?” asked Dean.

“It’s different every day. Every day I try to save you and I can’t. It just happens again and then I wake up again still in this town, and neither of you remembers anything.”

Sam was smart and sensible. He knew what psychic premonitions felt like. He was a good practical joker, but this didn’t have that kind of vibe at all. Maybe he really was having his own _Groundhog Day_ situation.

“It’s always Dean? It’s never me that dies?”

“Always Dean,” he repeated. “But not today.”

Why not today? But I could only focus on one question at a time. “So… Dean dies and you remember and I just… reset?”

“Not at first. For the first month or so, you remembered.” He said this with that crinkle in his forehead, his gaze fixed on what I was now pretty confident was the pancake man.

Doris came over, carrying a tray. I could see the coffee for me and Dean, and there was also some kind of sauce. Sam stopped talking as she got close to us.

“Here we are,” she said, “Two coffees, black and some hot sauce for the…”

I reached my hand out for the hot sauce as it fell from the tray, and instead of smashing all over the floor, it landed safe and sound in my hand.

“Thanks,” said Doris.

“Nice reflexes,” Dean remarked, as I stared at the bottle in my hand.

Thing is… it wasn’t reflexes. Not entirely. Because I had started reaching for that bottle _before_ it fell. Something told me it was going to fall and it felt like…

“Deja vu?” Sam asked, finally looking directly at me as Doris left, the coffees now on the table.

“Yeah…” I said.

He nodded. “That happens sometimes. Like you remember but not quite. Every now and then, you get a weird feeling or you remember something you shouldn’t.”

Dean dragged his coffee towards him. “You said Ellie remembered at first?”

“Yeah. For the first month or so. And it was… it sucked. We had to go through it again and again, watching you die and never able to do anything. It sucked, but at least… at least we were in it together, you know?. And then one day, I woke up and you just… didn’t remember anymore.”

“What changed?” I asked. “Did we do something different or special that day?”

He shook his head, turning back to look at Pancake Man. “It was just the same as any other day. Dean got electrocuted,” he added, so casual and matter-of-fact that I found it easy to believe he had gone through his brother’s death repeatedly. “It didn’t make any sense. Until yesterday.”

“So… what’s causing it?” Dean asked.

Doris arrived with our breakfast. I was super hungry and apparently, so was Dean, because we ate in silence for a little while. I got through my omelette in about five minutes, and Sam just stared at the guy with the pancakes all the time.

“So why are you staring…” I started.

“Eat your toast,” he said, politely, but with a definite sense of urgency.

It seemed like it was important to him, and clearly he had something going on in his mind, some plan or whatever. So I wolfed my toast down as fast as I could. Sam said I was repeating every day too, so I wondered if the amount of egg white omelettes and toast I was eating would show. Or was my body resetting too? I certainly didn’t feel like I’d spent months eating whole wheat bread.

I still had a bite of toast left to go and Dean had something on his plate too. But when the man with the pancakes got up and headed towards the door, Sam immediately got to his feet and followed. I looked at Dean, who looked back at me and I could see he was as alarmed as I was.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked Sam, as I was still squeezing my way out of the booth. His brother didn’t answer. He followed the pancake man. So Dean followed him. And after throwing down enough money for breakfast and a tip, I followed Dean.

We got out into the street, with the man walking at a normal pace, Sam taking advantage of his long legs to stride after him. Dean was hurrying at a good pace to catch up and I ran.

I arrived just as Sam had grabbed the Pancake Man and pushed him into a fence. In the same movement he had somehow gotten a wooden stake out of the bag he’d been carrying, and he put the pointed tip to the man’s throat.

“I know who you are,” said Sam. “Or should I say, what…”

“Oh my God,” the man begged. “Please don’t kill me.”

He was an ordinary looking guy, maybe fifty, and I would say he was not unattractive. His hair had gone grey. He was wearing a pale brown suit and a tie that didn’t entirely match.

“Um…” I took a couple of steps to get a bit closer, to see if I could defuse the situation. It was starting to seem like Sam had just gone crazy. Maybe I shouldn’t have humoured him about the timeloop thing. “Sam…”

“It took me a hell of a long time but I got it…” Sam said, ignoring me entirely.

“What?” asked his confused victim.

“It’s your M.O. that gave it away. Going after pompous jerks, giving them their just desserts. Your kind loves that, don’t they?”

The man swallowed and nodded slightly. “Yeah, sure, okay! Just… put the stake down…” he begged.

I took another step forward. “Sam, sweetie, maybe we should talk about…”

“No!” Sam insisted, finally looking at me, before quickly turning back to the man he was holding hostage. “There’s only one creature powerful enough to do what you’re doing. Making reality out of nothing, sticking people in time loops. In fact, you’d pretty much have to be a god. You’re have to be a Trickster.”

Tricksters were a pretty obscure piece of lore, but I remembered Sam had encountered one the previous year. The boys had called Dad for help with a really weird case involving alien abduction, ghosts and even a sewer alligator. They’d killed him, but not before he messed with them and had them at each other’s throats. I’d laughed my ass off when Dad told me how it let the tyres out of Dean’s beloved car.

“Mister, my name is Ed Coleman,” he protested. “My wife’s name is Amelia. I got two kids… For crying out loud, I sell ad space!”

“Don’t lie to me,” Sam demanded, and from where I stood beside him I could see how tight and steady he was gripping that stake. “I know what you are! We’ve killed one of your kind before!”

As I watched him, the man’s face changed. He was suddenly younger, with longer, blondish hair which was weird enough, but all his features changed. He was a completely different person.

“Actually bucko. You didn’t.”

I could tell from the way Dean stiffened that he recognised the guy, and Sam’s grip on the stake loosened slightly, maybe because he was surprised.

“This is the same Trickster from before?” I asked. “With the alien and the alligator?”

No longer pretending to be concerned about the stake pointing into his neck, the Trickster (if that’s even what he was) looked over at me and waggled his eyebrows in a way I’d only seen in cartoons.

“Quick on the uptake,” he said. “You’re smart as you are pretty. Why the hell are you hanging out with the Hardy Boys?”

“Why are you doing this?” asked Sam, as I tried to figure out if I’d just been complimented or not.

“You’re joking right? You chuckleheads tried to kill me last time. Why _wouldn’t_ I do this?

He had a point. It wasn’t difficult to see why he’d want to mess with Sam and Dean, given their previous encounter had ended with him being staked. Which should have worked, if he really was a Trickster.

“And Hasselback?” asked Dean. “What about him?”

The Trickster grinned. “That putz? He said he didn’t believe in wormholes so I dropped him in one.” He laughed. “Then you guys showed up. I made you the second you hit town.”

“So this is fun for you?” Sam demanded. “Killing Dean over and over again?”

The Trickster was so unbothered about being held and having a stake pressing on his neck that I was pretty convinced of two things. Firstly… That stake could not kill him. And if that was true, then he wasn’t an actual Trickster. At least, not of the kind I had read about.

“One, yes. It is fun,” he said, with a smile. “And two? This is _so_ not about killing Dean. This joke is on you, Sam. Watching your brother die everyday?” He left a pause there, just to let it sink in. “Forever?”

“What about Ellie?” asked Dean. “How come she remembered at first and then she didn’t?”

The Trickster chuckled. “Oh, that’s my favourite part. You roll into town with a sweet, caring girl, emotionally available, smart, smells nice? I let you have a support system. And then BAM! I took her away.”

“You son of a bitch,” Sam muttered, gripping the stake harder again. I had never seen him so angry. His face almost changed, even. The way he clenched his teeth made his jawline look different, and his eyes were very brown, and holding a rage I had never seen before.

I didn’t blame him. I was mad too. Poor Sam was forced to endure his brother’s death day after day, but taking me away too, wiping my memory so he’d have no one… That was extra cruel.

“How long will it take you to realise? You can’t save your brother. No matter what.”

“Oh yeah?” Sam asked. “I kill you, this all ends now.”

“Oh, hey! Whoa!” said the Trickster. But not in a way that really made me believe he was afraid to die. “Okay, look. I was just playing around. You can’t take a joke, fine. You’re out of it. Tomorrow, you’ll wake up and it’ll be Wednesday. I swear.”

“You’re lying,” Sam said.

“If I am, you know where to find me. Having pancakes at the diner.”

Sam looked at Dean on one side and then turned his head to me on the other. I didn’t know what to say or do. I wasn’t used to him being so angry, so I wasn’t sure how to handle it.

He looked back at the Trickster. “No. Easier to just kill you.”

“Sorry kiddo,” he said. “Can’t have that.”

He clicked his fingers and disappeared.

Sam was left holding a stake in one hand, and gripping an imaginary shirt in the other.

“Well, that was…” Dean said, trailing off as he failed to find the right word.

“Yeah,” I agreed. No words at all seemed the best way to describe it.

I took a step closer so I could reach out to take the stake from Sam’s hand. He was still kind of locked in position, staring at where the Trickster had been. If he was a Trickster. Maybe he just hadn’t been scared of the stake because he knew he could get away.

As soon as my hand touched Sam’s, he loosened up. He let me take the stake from him and I quickly passed it to Dean. Then I took Sam’s arm and led him over to a bench, so he could sit down. He let me lead him and then we sat together, as Dean lingered nearby. Dean knew that this was more my area than his.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t kill him, but you made him stop. Tomorrow it’ll be Wednesday.”

He didn’t seem at all comforted by this. I shuffled a little closer and grabbed one of his huge hands.

“It’s over now. It’s gonna be okay.”

Sam shook his head. “No it isn’t. If I wake up and it’s tomorrow… real tomorrow, not another today… _then_ I’ll believe it’s okay.”

I held his hand in both of mine, and looked up to see if Dean was watching. He was leaning against the fence, looking at his phone, stake back in the bag it had been so swiftly pulled out of. I could tell he was keeping an eye on us, but he was being subtle about it.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through this, Sam. It’s so cruel.”

He just sighed. “Thanks. Listen… can we just go back to the motel? I just want to go back and wait. And go to sleep as early as I can, so tomorrow comes sooner. Can we do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll let you win at rummy and everything.”

His tired and concerned face broke into the very slightest of smiles. I always played to win and lost anyway. I let his hand go and reached with both arms to hug him. Since we were side by side and there was a foot between us in height, it was an awkward sort of hug. But he leant into it.

After a few moments, very aware that Dean was close by, armed with “Sammy’s Little Girlfriend” jokes, I let go and jumped up off the bench. I reached out a hand and he held onto it as he got up. His eyes were the deep brown they always were when he was upset. But he got to his feet and let me lead the way back to Dean.


	70. Chapter 69: Pepperoni

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is trying to help Sam recover from what happened at the Mystery Spot. But then she has an unexpected encounter...

Dean woke me on Wednesday. It was still early, but not unreasonably so, and Sam wanted to get out of town as soon as possible to get away from the Trickster and everything that had happened. Dean complied with that request without making any kind of joke,which just went to show how upset Sam really was by the whole situation. Dean could normally make light of anything, but even he couldn’t be flippant about his brother’s distress.

By nine am, we were on the road, not headed in any particular direction. Dean had Motorhead turned up real loud, subtly giving Sam an excuse to just stare out his window and not say anything. Every now and again, Dean would turn the music down and ask a question about which route to take. Sam didn’t answer or just gave a noncommittal shrug or a grunt. I figured maybe he wasn’t bothering because he didn’t truly believe we’d go anywhere. He’d said that he’d tried leaving town a few times during his endless string of Tuesdays, but Dean always died before they got far, and then he’d wake up, back in that same motel again, that same song playing.

I figured the best thing for Sam was to get out of the state as quick as possible, to prove to him that it really was over. We stopped briefly for gas, but I wouldn’t let Dean stop again until we were well over the border into Georgia. Sam cheered up a little as we ate lunch in some crappy roadside diner on the highway. I was skimming the local paper for any potential cases. Although I didn’t find anything, I read some of it out anyway. I loved the way those little county papers reported on things like a local fair or a church event. It was nice the way the community was so important to people, and I found it refreshing to read about people living simple, peaceful lives, where the most dramatic thing that ever happened to them was Mrs Wanda Freeman’s plum preserve _not_ winning at the county fair this year.

“And apparently this Miss Jenny Page is new to the area, after previously living in Atlanta, where her grandmother taught her an old family secret for truly splendid preserves,” I said, before popping another french fry in my mouth.

“Well that’s just cheating,” said Dean, though he would normally roll his eyes and ignore my dramatic readings of local papers. “Damn city folk coming down here with their flashy preserve recipes, right Sam?”

“Right,” Sam agreed, and I could see the beginnings of a smile in one corner of his mouth.

“It’s outrageous is what it is,” I agreed. “But at least Mrs Freeman still took home top prize for her spongecake.”

“Oh, well that’s a relief,” Dean said.

“If you weren’t hunting,” I began, slightly tentative as this wasn’t a concept Dean liked to entertain, “What kind of place would you want to live? I mean, permanent-like.”

The boys both considered this, as Dean chewed on his burger and Sam moved his salad around the bowl, presumably thinking I didn’t notice that he wasn’t eating it.

“I dunno,” Dean said, finally. “What about you? Would you wanna stay in Sioux Falls?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I like it there. It’s not the biggest city, but it’s got everything I’d ever want.”

“I could live in Sioux Falls,” said Sam. “Or even somewhere smaller, like around here.”

“You want to live in some farm town?” Dean asked. “What and grow beans or something?”

“Not everyone living in the country is a farmer, Dean. Anyway, I like how people know each other and everyone’s friendly. I think it’d be nice.”

“You want a picket fence, too?” asked Dean. “Two point three kids?”

“Sure,” said Sam. “Why not?”

I sensed an oncoming argument and moved to deflect it.“So, you’re a city guy?” I asked Dean. “I see it. A tiny apartment in Manhattan, a different burger joint every night.”

“I like the burger part,” Dean agreed. “Not sure about the apartment.”

“I think you’d like a little place to yourself,” I told him. “With good access to bars and local nightlife. Maybe not too far from where you work.”

“Uh huh,” said Dean, hiding a smile. “And what kind of work do I do in this little fantasy?”

I shrugged. “Mechanic?”

He just nodded at this, apparently unable to disagree with me, even though he was sceptical about the whole thing. “So what about Sam? What’s he doing, way out in Nowhereville?”

I looked carefully at Sam as I considered it. The obvious answer was that he would be a lawyer, but that felt too raw. It would be like reminding him of all the dreams that shattered when poor Jess was killed. But then, a mental image came to me, unbidden.

“Lumberjack?”

Dean burst out laughing, and Sam even cracked a little smile that brought out his dimples.

“Damn, Princess,” Dean laughed. “Is that where your mind goes on cold, lonely nights?!”

I was feeling flirty, so I went with it. “It never did before, but now it might…”

Sam went full dimple, and even put a forkful of salad into his mouth.

Dean shuddered. “Don’t even start, I’m trying to eat.”

Maybe it was just fun to gross Dean out, and maybe I was looking at Sam across the table and the way his left dimple deepened just did stuff to me. But mostly, I just wanted to make my friend smile again, not for me and my dirty mind, but for him.

“Sam, you can log my virgin forest anytime…”

Dean began to choke on his burger and his brother had to slap him on the back a few times. But you know what? Sam was smiling.

 

* * *

 

 

We spent Wednesday night at a roadside motel on the interstate, just inside South Carolina. It was nice that Sam could smile a little, but of course, seven words of innuendo were not enough to instantly fix my friend and bring him back to himself. If anything, he seemed worse that night than he had been the day before, after he’d confronted the trickster and we’d gone back to the motel. I tried to be as cheerful and peppy as possible, while also making it clear I was sympathetic.

There was a bar across the road, and Dean decided he was going to head over and get some food and beer, his basic fuel requirements. And if he happened to pick up as well, I guess that was just a bonus. Sam didn’t want to go with him, and I didn’t want to go and enjoy myself if Sam couldn’t. I ordered us a pizza each, figuring that whether or not he stole my pepperoni would be a good indicator of his real mood.

Once Dean was gone and the pizza ordered, Sam took a shower while I gathered my blankets and unrolled my mat to start building my nest for later. The pizza came right about the same time I heard Sam shut the water off, so I called through to him while I peeked in the boxes to see which was which.

There was no sofa in the room, but I grabbed the pillows from Dean's bed and propped them next to the wall where I'd laid out my own bedroll and blankets. I brought the two pizza boxes down with me and when Sam came out, I was ready on my floor couch, with a comfy seat and a warm pizza waiting beside me.

With wet hair and a single t-shirt that hung off his broad shoulders and outlined his offensively toned torso, Sam emerged and looked around the room. Seeing me, he smiled and came over to sit on the floor beside me.

“You could’ve sat on my bed,” he said, lowering himself down.

“I know.” He would never have complain, even if I rubbed pizza sauce all over his sheets. “But I thought I’d invite you round to my place for once.”

He picked his pizza box up and balanced it on his knees as he opened it. “You cooked and everything.”

“Five star service,” I said, with a smile that was completely genuine, I was so happy that Sam felt able to joke.

We had a few pieces of pizza each, sitting side by side in silence. But he just ate his own, and didn’t once reach across to steal from mine.

“You want some pepperoni?” I asked, picking a piece off and holding it out to him.

He shook his head. “Nah, I’m okay.”

I ate the little piece myself, and finished off the last of the slice. “We can talk about it,” I said. “If you want.”

He pushed his pizza box away, though he’d only eaten half of it. And he hadn’t finished his salad at lunch, either. I was watching real careful.

“I don’t even know how to start talking about it,” he said.

I wasn’t done eating yet, but I made sure to look at him while I finished my mouthful. Then I answered him.

“We could talk about something else too, if that’s better.”

“Do you… What if… Ellie, what if we can’t save Dean? What if our research turns up nothing and Ruby can’t help and Dean… Dean dies?”

Deep deep down, in the very pit of my stomach, where it was real dark and all my nightmares lived, I knew we couldn’t save Dean. He was going to Hell in four months, and there wasn’t anything I could do to prevent it. But I struggled to admit that to myself, to face that dark thought. Revealing it to Sam seemed like cruelty. His own fears were bad enough without adding mine.

“It’s gonna be…”

“But what if it isn’t?” he asked, before I could even finish.

“Then there’s me,” I said, setting aside my unfinished pizza. “There’s me and there’s Dad and we’ll stick by you and we’ll make sure you’re okay.”

“How will I be okay?” he asked, brown eyes looking into mine and piercing my heart so deep I felt real physical pain in my chest. “How can I ever be okay, knowing he’s in Hell, and it’s my fault.”

I had thought about that before, and I did have a sort of answer prepared, but I wasn’t sure Sam would like it or believe it.

“Sam… it is _not_ your fault. You didn’t ask Dean to make a deal for you. You didn’t want it or expect it. He made a choice. I’m not saying Dean deserves Hell, and I’m not blaming him. But he _did_ choose to make that deal, and he knew what the consequences were when he did it. That is not on you.”

“He did it to save me,” Sam said, looking down at his knees and not at me. “He did it because of me.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I really believed. That Dean had made his deal for himself. Maybe he thought it was for Sam’s sake, but the way he’d talked about it after, I could tell that he’d really done it because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t. That had nothing to do with Sam, that was about his own conscience.

Not that I really thought Dean was to blame for it either. He’d had it instilled in him since four years old that Sam was his responsibility, that he had to protect him. It wasn’t really surprising that he hadn’t been able to cope with losing him. But that was John Winchester’s fault. He had given Dean that sense of responsibility. Sam hadn’t chosen it or asked for it, and it was not his fault.

“No. The blame belongs to the guy that killed you. You refused to kill him to save yourself, and he repaid that by stabbing you in the back. If he hadn’t made that choice to kill you, Dean never would have made that deal. You were good and honourable and he betrayed you. This is his fault.”

“I never really…” he began, then shook his head and started again, still looking down at his knees. “I dream about it sometimes. I should have killed him when I had the chance. Not because of what he did to me… When I dream about him, it’s in that cemetery. It’s what he tried to do to you…”

It wasn’t like I thought about it all the time, but I did occasionally remember that horrible night in the cemetery when the gates flew open. Sometimes it was the smoke flying past me as demons busted out of Hell. But sometimes it was that guy, Jake, and how scared I was, when he made me put a gun to my own head. I wasn’t like Sam or Dean, or Ellen or Dad. I knew any one of them would have died rather than let that guy open the gates. But I wasn’t brave enough. I wanted them to put their guns down so he didn’t hurt me.

And they did. They did and he opened the gate. Because of me.

“Oh, Sam honey, no!” I squeaked, throwing my arms around him. “No! That wasn’t your fault either. And look,” I let go. “Look, I’m okay. I’m fine.”

“But if I’d just killed…”

“If you’d just killed him back in Cold Oak, you’d be a different person. Refusing to play that demon’s game… Refusing to kill someone, even when they were trying to kill you… That’s part of what makes you special. That’s why you’re my number one favourite Sun Drop.”

I could read Sam’s mood in the shade of his eyes. They were deep dark brown, so I knew it meant a lot to him for me to say that. It was true of course, completely true. But he didn’t reply. He just put his arm around my middle and squeezed me.

After a minute, he let go again, and reached for my pizza box. He pulled it towards him and opened it, plucking a piece of pepperoni right off a slice before I could stop him.

“Hey!” I protested.

He dropped it into his mouth with a smug smile. I knew he wasn’t okay, and that he hadn’t recovered from what happened. But if he was stealing my toppings, he obviously wanted to pretend like he had. So I pulled my pizza back to me, and he reached out for his.

“Why don’t you just order pepperoni next time?” I asked.

He smiled. “It tastes better when it’s illicit.”

I looked at his pizza, to see what he had that I didn’t. I spied half an olive, and reached over to pick it off, and quickly ate it before he could stop me.

“You’re right,” I said, when I’d swallowed it. “Crime does taste good.”

His dimples were so deep, I could have mined for coal inside. When he smiled, and really meant it, it was difficult not to be totally in love with his face. But I managed it, just barely, and got back to eating my pizza, while trying to defend it from theft.

 

* * *

 

 

Thursday we spent on the move again, though at a somewhat less dramatic pace. Sam had got through two new mornings without waking up back in that same motel room again, with that same song playing. It seemed to calm his fears somewhat, confirm that his ordeal really was over. By Friday afternoon, as we pulled into yet another motel, he was much less skittish and nervous.

He agreed to stay more than one night, so we could spend the Saturday looking for potential cases and trying to track down Bela. Sam was going to try a little hacking, to see if her car had been ticketed. She seemed like someone who would speed and perhaps even flout parking regulations.

I’d been in the back of the car all day, and for most of the previous two as well. So, while the boys got settled in, I figured I’d walk to a nearby grocery store and get us some essentials. Potato chips, pretzels, apples for Sam, that kind of thing.

The guy on the desk told me how to get there and I walked at a casual kind of pace, just taking advantage of the opportunity to be out in the fresh air and the setting sun. It was chilly, but I’d remembered to wear my jacket, so I wasn’t too cold. There was a bit of a mid February bite to the air, but it wasn’t windy, which helped take the edge off.

It was a long enough walk that I didn’t feel like dawdling at the store or getting too much, since I’d have to carry it back. It wasn’t exactly a trying distance, but what can I say, I’m lazy. I got the stuff we needed, plus a few extra treats for the boys and a magazine for me. After paying (I still had plenty left of what Bela had given me), I tried to even out the weight of the bags a bit, before setting out to go back.

I was only one block from the store, passing the bowling alley, when I felt the presence of someone else really close. I turned quickly as a man came up behind me, dropping my bags and reaching for the pink flick knife in my jeans pocket.

“Whoa, sweetheart, chill out.” A familiar face smiled broadly at me, raising both eyebrows. “I just wanna help you with your bags.”

It was the Trickster from Florida. No longer wearing a suit or his fake face, he was dressed pretty much like Sam or Dean would. His longish light brown hair made him seem a little younger than his face suggested. If he’d been human, I’d have said he was maybe thirty-five. He was sort of handsome, too. If I’d seen him in a bar, I’d have made a move.

“Like hell you do!” I said. But I stopped reaching for my knife and picked my bags back up. A little flick knife wasn’t going to hurt him anyway, so why bother? If he’d decided to mess with me, I was screwed.

I turned back around and quickened my pace along the street, but he easily caught up and walked alongside me.

“Fine, don’t let me be a gentleman,” he said, with amusement in his voice. “But can’t I at least escort you home?”

I continued to speed up, but what was the point? He matched me step for step, and given I was a mere human, I suspected his top speed was much faster than mine. Plus he could teleport and shit, so why bother trying to get away?

I sighed. “What do you want?”

“I was just wondering if your friend Sam has learned his lesson?”

“What lesson?” I asked. “That you’re an asshole? Yeah. He’s aware.”

He laughed. “Dean can’t be saved. That’s the lesson. And you know it, don’t you?”

Maybe, secretly, at the bottom of my stomach. But not to this jerk’s face.

“We don’t know that for sure. Sam’s smart and so’s my father. I’m not stupid either. We’ll figure something…”

“Oh, darling, you don’t even sound like you believe yourself. Dean’s going to Hell and you know it.”

“What’s it to you?” I asked. “Who are you to be teaching Sam lessons anyhow?”

He waggled his eyebrows at me, the way he had in Florida. It really did remind me of a cartoon. “I’m a Trickster,” he said. “Valuable life lessons through ironic punishment. It’s how we roll, kid.”

I turned away from him to look where I was going again. “Yeah, sure. If you’re a Trickster, how come you didn’t die when the boys staked you back in Ohio? And messing with time? Making a day take three months in one little town in Florida? I don’t think Tricksters can do that, so what even are you?”

“And I thought Sam was the smart one,” he said. “You’re quite the little detective, aren’t you?”

“I’m at least a medium-sized detective, so lose the patronising language,” I scolded. “What do you want from me?”

He chuckled. “I’m curious. Been waiting to catch you on your own, so we could have a real chat. Get to know each other.”

“Well, whatever you are, you can obviously trap me or teleport me or anything you like.”

“True,” he said. “But isn’t this nicer?”

“Nicer isn’t your style. It was horrible what you did to Sam. It was torture.”

“He could have ended it any time by just accepting his brother has to die.”

I just grunted in response.

“But let’s talk about _you,_ cupcake. You know what’s interesting about you?”

Having decided to just ignore him, I kept walking straight. I didn’t really think he’d take the hint, but he might get bored of me if I didn’t answer him, and there was still a twenty minute walk back to the motel.

“After that first thirty days, I thought _Why not wipe the girl’s memory too?_ Figured that’d really hammer the message home for your boyfriend.”

He had been watching Sam for three months, and he clearly knew he was not my boyfriend, so I assumed this was an attempt to antagonise me into talking.

“So I wiped your mind. Only not quite. On day 31, you caught that sauce bottle. day 32, you pulled Dean away from oncoming traffic. Like you knew he’d been hit before. Day 35 you got deja-vu when Sam told you what was happening. Thought maybe you’d dreamed it.”

Though I was pretending to ignore him as I kept walking, I was totally listening. I had to admit to myself that I was curious about why he let me have those weird little half memories. Sam said it had happened a lot, but I didn’t know what it meant. How did that serve the game this thing was playing with him?

“I could have fixed it, of course,” he said. “I could have wiped your brain thoroughly if I wanted to. I could take every memory, piece of cake. But I was intrigued by you. I put as much energy into wiping your mind as Dean’s, or anyone else I’ve ever played with. It’s a simple trick. But somehow, with you, it didn’t quite take.”

I didn’t realise I’d stopped walking, and I’d been intending to keep ignoring him but it was too hard. Damn my curiosity! “What are you saying? That you didn’t mean for me to remember little pieces like that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’d say you remembered. But little echoes stayed behind. Don’t get me wrong, I could easily have fixed it if I wanted.”

“But you didn’t want to?”

I started walking again and he kept moving alongside me. “I was curious. What kind of mind would throw up resistance like that? Gotta be something special.”

I frowned. “Am I supposed to be flattered or something?”

“You could be if you wanted,” he shrugged. “But you asked why I’m here, sweet pea. And that’s…”

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped.

“You let Sam…”

“Only Sam gets to call me that. Ever.”

He grinned. “Sure thing, peach.” How many patronising petnames did this guy know? “But tell me something… What’s gonna happen when Dean’s gone?”

“We’re gonna save Dean.”

“That’s crap and you know it. So, what are you gonna do when he’s gone? Go home to your father? Or stick with Sam, one hundred-percent platonically definitely not attracted to each other, as you drive around the country in his dead brother’s car, out for revenge?”

“Shut up,” I said.

“I’m just saying, pumpkin. Get yourself an exit strategy, cos I don’t think you’re gonna like Sam when he’s angry.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” I asked, trying to maintain a quick pace, so he’d be gone all the sooner. Assuming he didn’t zap me right back to the bowling alley or something.

“Like I said, you’re special. You intrigue me, and you make me laugh. So you’ve earned a little free advice. Get your fingers out of your ears and start thinking about what happens when Dean’s gone. Or you’ll regret it.”

“I’ll stay with Sam,” I said. “Or make him come home with me. It doesn’t matter. Whatever he needs, I’ll be there.”

“Will you?” he asked.

“Yes.” Not only was it the right thing to do, and what I wanted to do. I’d promised Dean.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, muffin.”

“Then you don’t know shit about me, _kitten_. I’d never leave Sam while he’s grieving.”

“Whatever you say, sweetiepie. But maybe you should ask your boy what happened Wednesday.”

“We left first thing in the morning Wednesday,” I said, trying to search for another endearment for the asshole. “Sugarcookie.”

He smirked. “Sure. But which Wednesday?”

I stopped walking to stare at him. What was that supposed to mean? He’d put Sam through a hundred Tuesdays, but Wednesday had gone fine… Or had it? I wouldn’t know, would I? Not if he’d wiped my memory again.

“What do you…”

He chuckled. “See you round, angel.”

Then he was gone, and I was alone in the chilly evening air, wondering how many Wednesdays Sam had been through, and why he hadn’t told me about them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to reach 300 followers for Ellie's story over on Tumblr. So if you have a tumblr account and haven't checked out the blog and all the extra content there, now would be a good time. :D
> 
> The url is: winchestersplusone.tumblr.com
> 
> (PS. If I get to 300 followers by Christmas, I'll be writing a special chapter. It's the spooning incident from Chapter 67, from Sam's POV)


	71. Chapter 70: Bullshit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has been arrested. Maybe. She thinks. There’s only one thing that will buy her more time: Bullshit.

I’d actually been handcuffed before, but that was a whole other kind of deal (and not as exciting as I had been lead to believe, by the way). Plus, sometimes it’s good to practice escaping cuffs, cos a girl’s gotta be prepared. Whatever, anyway, it was my first time under arrest. At least… I was pretty sure I was under arrest…

Long story short, we tracked down Bela to this little town in Colorado. Only we didn’t. We got to her motel room and then she called Dean to gloat and keep him talking and suddenly, there were the cops. Serious cops. Feds. When they read the rights they only said “Sam and Dean Winchester”, but they cuffed all three of us.

Is that even legal? I had no idea, but could they cuff me if they didn’t read me my rights? It sure didn’t seem legal. But the FBI guy in charge was the same one I’d seen the year before, when the boys got stuck in that bank in Milwaukee. He’d obviously been tracking us across the country and Bela’s tip off had finally given him the arrest he wanted. Since he thought the guys were crazed grave robbing serial killer terrorists, I could see how maybe he wouldn’t get too hung up on minor details like my constitutional rights.

So there I was, handcuffed to a desk in a pathetic little office in a pathetic little police station in what was probably a pathetic little town. I could easily pick my cuffs and get free, of course. But what would be the point? Sam and Dean would still be under heavy security, and the idea of escaping without them never even entered my mind. Better to sit tight, gather information and prepare myself for a properly thought-out escape attempt.

They’d closed the door on me, so I couldn’t hear anything that was going on in the main area of the station. But I could sorta see through the window in the door. I had an eyeline on a small area of the station, but I could only see people if they were standing up. Mostly, they were walking back and forth, and based on the mental map I’d made on my way in, there was plenty of movement between the main office area and the cells. I saw that as confirmation my boys were still around. Since this was an FBI taskforce of some kind, they were probably waiting for a secure way to get Sam and Dean to somewhere high security. Probably a Supermax, so my best bet for busting them out was before they left the police station. It was a little town lock-up, so it was likely to be pretty inadequate, security wise.

As I sat there, peering out the window and trying to formulate something resembling a plan, I noticed a figure was coming along the corridor towards the office. It was the main Fed, who I remembered from that whole Milwaukee siege situation. His name was Agent Heinrich or Hendrik on something like that. It looked like he was planning to come in, and I was right. There was a click as the door unlocked and then he came in, closing it again behind him.

Still trying to gather information, I sat in silence and watched as he pulled up a chair and sat on the other side of the desk. He looked at me for a moment, so I smiled at him and raised two eyebrows, waiting for him to speak first.

He reached into his pocket and I could see right away that he’d been inside the Impala. He held a pile of my fake IDs, which were kept in the same box with Sam and Dean’s. He dropped them down onto the table in front of me as he spoke the name on each one.

“Agent Elenore Mills, FBI. Diana Prince, US Marshal, Doctor Karen Singer, CDC.  Karen Carpenter, _Weekly World News_. Agent Roberta Carter, FBI. Doctor Stevie Fleetwood, Department of Health. Agent Grace Jefferson, also FBI.” He held up the stack of my remaining IDs. “Should I go on?”

I smiled. “To be honest, you’ve done most of the good ones already.”

He threw the rest of the pile down on the desk in front of me. “I don’t think you realise how much trouble you’re in. You could be looking at accessory to murder, at the minimum.”

Seemed like the best thing to do was to keep smiling and stay calm. I was no lawyer, but since no one had seen me in Milwaukee, and I hadn’t been around for the boys’ other alleged crimes, he’d never make murder stick and he knew it. He could pin me for breaking into Bela’s motel room, and I’d never talk my way out of the fake IDs, but that was all.

“Doubt it,” I said, cheerfully. “Or else you’d have arrested me properly. You know you only said “Sam and Dean Winchester” when you did the Miranda, don’t you? Do I have the right to remain silent or don’t I? You can charge me on those IDs, but I’d definitely have a case to sue for mishandling my arrest.”

He sighed, frowning with his entire face, as he looked closely into my eyes. “Okay, you’re obviously a smart girl…”

“Woman,” I corrected.

“A smart woman,” he acknowledged. “But I get it. Dean Winchester’s a good looking guy, he’s charming…”

My burst of laughter was genuine, and slightly painful as it made my cuffed right hand jerk back. “Yeah, that’s what he’s always telling everyone. You’re kidding, right? You think I’m some sort of… groupie?”

“You tell me why you’re following a pair of serial killers around the country…”

“Maybe I’m not. Maybe they’re following me. I could be the mastermind behind it all.”

He leant forward and his tone changed from one of hostility and suspicion to something softer. He was a pro.

“Listen, these guys are dangerous and they’ve got no limits. You think this is gonna have a happy ending?”

“Definitely,” I said. “I thought about staying in school, but then I said to myself _You know what? Where is education really going to take you in life? What you need to do is find yourself a nice serial killer. You’ll have his babies and it’ll be Happily Ever After_.”

“This isn’t a joke, Miss. They’ve already turned on you and if they stick to their story, you’re looking at some serious charges. But I know these guys, and I understand what’s going on here.”

I tried to imagine how this situation looked to Agent Dumbass or whoever he was. He’d been tracking Dean, who he believed had committed at least two murders. He was also out for Sam, and he once told me that during one of their previous arrests, the cops had decided he was a sort of dumb little brother, enthralled by Dean into joining his life of crime. So, I guess when that was the story you were looking at, it made sense for me to be this naive girl Dean was manipulating.

I still needed to escape and to bust the boys out too, so maybe it was worth just going along with his perception, so I could buy myself more time to think. If I played the victim, they’d pay less attention to me, but if I stayed stubborn, I might end up in the cells too. It was so insulting, but common sense told me to just roll with it.

Plausible backstories was my speciality. The Winchesters liked to walk in with a rockstar alias and a fake ID. Maybe that worked for them, but I tried to establish a character. Don’t pretend to be an FBI agent. _Become_ the FBI agent. According to the clock on the wall, it took me about forty-five seconds to construct myself an identity.

I leaned forward. “You don’t understand,” I said, keeping my voice low, but trying to inject a hint of desperation into my tone. As I spoke, I tried to remember some of the saddest moments of my life, hoping I could maybe manage to cry. “I… I owe him everything and I… he protects me!”

Even though I hadn’t yet got any tears out, I had interested the Fed enough that his expression softened and he leaned forward too, mirroring me.

“What does he protect you from?” he asked.

“I don’t have anyone else,” I said, managing to make my voice quiver. “He… I got nowhere else to go.”

Agent Gullible surveyed me carefully, looking close at my face and at my free hand sitting on the table. “You know what he does, don’t you? You know what he’s capable of…”

I nodded my head, putting a hand to my mouth like I was trying to stop myself crying. If I could get this act to work, he might leave me unguarded or take me to a different room. I needed him to think I wanted away from Dean, so he wouldn’t bother to worry about me busting the boys out.

“I can help you,” he said, taking my bait completely. “But I need you to tell me everything about the Winchesters. With your help, I can put these psychos away for life.”

Now I shook my head. “I… I can’t. He’ll kill me, I’m not… He said he’d kill me if I ever…”

Throwing myself into the role completely, I even managed to get a few tears out. Tiny pools were welling up, still clinging to my eyelashes. But it was a start.

“We can protect you,” said the Fed.

I didn’t want to give in too soon. It had to seem real. How scared would I be of the Dean this guy believed in? He was into digging up corpses and all kinds of ritual shit as far as the Feds knew. And I didn’t think a sweet, naive but brainwashed girl would turn on him that quickly.

So I shook my head again, holding my hand to my face and looking up at him through teary eyes. I even managed to accidentally emit a little squeak without even intending to.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he said. “I know you’re scared. What’s your name? Your real one?”

“Karen,” I squeaked. At least four of my fake IDs said that, so I figured it was a good bet.

“Okay, Karen.” He spoke in soft, soothing tones. “I’m Agent Henriksen. How about we both forget what you said to me before, huh? That cocky attitude is something you learned from Dean, isn’t it?”

It was getting easier, and I was able to give off another mousey squeak. “He… he said if we got caught I had to… um… I had to be cool. But I don’t wanna go to jail…”

“Of course you don’t. Listen, I’ve got to call my boss, but I’ll send someone in with some water for you, alright?”

I nodded meekly like the frightened girl In Too Deep that I was supposed to be.

“When I come back, you can tell me all about Dean. And Sam too.”

“No, he’ll kill me,” I sobbed, ramping up my fake distress and thinking about my father and how scared I’d been that he was dying that time.

He was out of his chair now, and even put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. Because I may not have been the best hunter in the world, but damn, I could act!

“Let me talk to my boss, and we’ll see what we can do, okay? We can get you protection. We do this kind of thing all the time.”

Sniffing pathetically, I looked up at him, trying to consciously make my eyes bigger. I wished I knew how Sam sometimes managed to look like a puppy forced to take a bath. But I did the best I could with my own face and Agent Henriksen squeezed my shoulder slightly as he looked down at me. Sucker.

I didn’t want to ask him to uncuff me, annoying as the thing was. I let him leave me there, maintaining my crying act until he was gone. Then I eased off a bit, but didn’t wipe my eyes or anything. He’d said someone would come in with water, so I wanted to look convincing for that.

I sat there in silence, tweaking a few details of my backstory while I took in the contents of the room. Standard issue desk, quite heavy looking. I’d been living on the streets before Dean found me. Big enough window, opened onto a parking lot. Dean had given me shelter and food and I’d thought he was real nice. Some kind of cupboard, maybe full of stationary or files? At first, the Winchesters had told me they were just roadtripping. No computer on the desk, just papers everywhere. I’d finally figured out we were running from the cops, but I didn’t know why and I had nowhere else to go. Two chairs, mine plastic with arms, and the other a swivel chair. Dean had convinced me he was innocent and the cops had the wrong guy and I’d believed him because I wanted to. Air vent near the door, no screws. The first time Dean killed someone in front of me, I tried to run but he sent Sam to catch me. Plenty of loose paper on the desk and even the floor. Sam had caught me and taken me back. Clock over the door. Ooh! What if Sam and I were secretly in love but we both feared Dean’s jealous retribution? Clock looked cheap, probably ran on a pair of AA batteries. When Hendricks came back, I could definitely act like I was trying to pin everything on Dean, in an attempt to protect Sam. Desk drawer was locked but I could possibly jimmy it open. Slowly, I could come to realise that Sam was in too deep; perhaps I could beg for his freedom. That would have more realism to it, wouldn’t it? Or was I getting too complicated? Couple of pens on the desk, mostly ballpoint. The more detail the better, though, as long as I could remember it. Chewing gum on the underside of desk, what is this, 4th grade? Disgraceful! Aha! A loose nail under the shitty old desk!

Hearing voices close by in the corridor, I quickly sat up straight. The girl I was playing would not be casing the room for escape tools. The door opened and a woman came in. She was maybe the same age as me, conservatively dressed, long black hair, dark eyes. She wore a crucifix round her neck. Judging by her outfit, she wasn’t a cop, so maybe some kind of civilian admin help? She was super cute.

She was carrying a little plastic cup like from a water cooler, and her careful steps indicated it was full. She came into the room slowly and approached, putting the cup down on the desk for me.

“Thankyou,” I said, sniffing for effect. I could feel that slight burn around my eyes that suggested they were red from tears. Awesome.

“You’re welcome,” she said, but I noticed she was keeping her distance a little.

I reached for the water with my free hand, and took a sip before putting it back down. Then I rubbed at my eyes.

“Is that… Mr Henriksen, is he coming back?”

She nodded, still a sensible and wary distance away. This girl was no fool. “He’s on the phone,” she said.

I nodded, wondering if I could perhaps model my meek persona on hers. Looking at the way she held herself as she walked back to the door, I saw a lack of confidence in her tentative steps. But she didn’t seem hunched or bowed like someone trying to make themselves deliberately smaller. It must have been an unconscious posture thing. I could fake that.

She left, shutting the door behind her. How long would this Henriksen guy spend on the phone? Caution suggested I should wait, and lead him on some more. But if I waited too long, his Fed friends would arrive with some form of armoured transportation. I had to get free and help my boys before their ride came. I looked at the clock, figuring I’d give it five minutes.

It was only three before Agent Henriksen came back in. As soon as I saw him at the door, I started rubbing my eyes, to make them redder, and to provide a reason why they weren’t wet. He’d figure I’d been crying and then managed to pull myself together.

He sat back down opposite me in the wheelie chair. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Need more water?”

I picked up the cup as I shook my head, then gulped a little water down, for the look of it. As I was doing so, he took out a notebook.

“Okay, Karen. I can offer you witness protection and immunity for anything but murder.”

I made the effort to open my eyes wider. “Oh no, I’ve never… I couldn’t kill somebody!”

He nodded, and gave a small “hmm” as he turned to a clean page.

“I mean, one time I saw…” I stopped like I had been about to say too much and he took the bait.

“What did you see?” he asked.

I tried to seem alarmed as I shook my head at him. “Nothing, I didn’t see anything. Please, where’s Dean?”

“He’s locked up tight in the cells here. He can’t get to you, Karen.”

The squeaking sounds Dean found so annoying had seemed to work earlier, so I let out another little one before I looked down meekly at the desk.

“What about Sam?” I looked up again, deciding to go for the “tragically and secretly in love with Sam” bit. That kind of detail might make him think twice if he suspected I was faking. It was unnecessary, and therefore would seem more real.

“Sam too,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed the hint of hope in my voice.

“Is he… will Sam go to jail?”

“You don’t need to worry, Karen. With a charge sheet this long, the Winchester boys will go away for good.”

I sniffled as I looked up at him. “But Sam isn’t… he never hurt anybody, I swear. He’s… Dean makes him do stuff, but he wouldn’t hurt someone, honest.”

It began to dawn on Henriksen what was going on. He shifted in his chair, suddenly leaning forward and looking at me closely.

“It’s not gonna happen. Sam’s looking at accessory in at least two murders.”

To get the required emotional truth, I just focused on how unfair it was that Sam and Dean really were in trouble. “But it’s not fair!” I cried. “He doesn’t want to do any of it!”

“That’s not how the law works.”

“But he’s just scared!” It made total sense that I would start talking out of distress. My fear of this invented version of Dean could potentially be overpowered by my imaginary love for Sam.

I could write soap operas.

“Please, you don’t understand what he’s like… he makes people do stuff! But Sam’s a good man, really!”

I was throwing so much into my performance that I actually started to feel as upset as I sounded. After all, it was essentially true. Sam really was being accused of crimes he didn’t commit. They thought my Sam was a violent murderer with no conscience or remorse. Sam! Who felt sympathy even for the monsters we hunted.

Maybe Hunters should just stop altogether. Go on strike, see how the civilians got on without us. Ungrateful piece of shit Fed wasn’t a tenth of the man Sam was!

Meanwhile, he apparently really had forgotten my earlier cocky bravado. He seemed convinced by my act.

“If Sam wants to make a deal, that’s up to him.”

“He’s a good man!” I sobbed. “Really!”

Agent What’s-His-Name sighed and lay his notebook flat on the desk. “Okay, how about you tell me everything you know, and then we’ll talk about what we can do for Sam…”

I needed to buy more time. I didn’t actually want to tell a story that would paint Dean as a deranged serial killer who desecrated graves for kicks. In the event that I couldn’t then bust him out, it would be even worse for him.

Taking another sip of my water, I had an idea. “Get him away, first…” I said, hoping I was projecting a sufficient level of fear. “When he’s in jail or whatever…”

“Alright,” he said, and I knew I’d convinced him. “But you’ll have to stay in custody until then.”

I nodded with enthusiasm. “Yes, yes, thankyou! Yes, I’ll stay here.”

He even gave me a sympathetic smile as he stood up. “You just sit tight, okay.”

Figuring I should be too grateful for words, I just nodded again and watched him as he headed for the door.

As soon as he was gone, I started counting to ten, nice and slow. I could no longer see him through the window in the door. I watched for another thirty seconds or so, and saw no activity anywhere near the office.

So I lowered my head back under the desk, to see what I could do about that getting me that loose nail...


	72. Chapter 71: The Great Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie spends well over 2500 words inside an airconditioning duct. Because YOLO?

Once the Fed guy had left the room and shut the door behind him, I counted to ten. Then bent down to look under the desk again. I quickly found the loose nail with my free hand. I was left-handed, and they had not known that, so they’d cuffed me on the right. Even so, not having another hand to keep me steady made removing the nail a lengthy process. I also had to keep one eye on the door.

The nail was one of those that attached the sides to the top, so it was parallel to the underside of the desk. Most of the wood beneath it had crumbled away, but there was still enough to keep it in. I’d need to remove some more.

It took me a couple of minutes to chip away at the crumbling wood. I got little splinters under my nails, which was painful, but not unbearable. I could feel at least one had gotten under my skin and into my forefinger too. It wasn’t enough to deter me.

Next step was to grab the loose sharp end between my thumb and index finger and wiggle the thing back and forth. As I loosened it, the distance I could move it became greater and finally, I felt the wood around the head of the nail give. I pulled and the whole nail came away. There were plenty of others holding the desk up, thankfully, as it would have been hard to disguise it if the whole thing had came crashing down.

I flipped the nail around in my hand and turned my attention to the handcuffs. Once, on a dull night, I’d been bragging about my lock-picking skills. Dean bet me fifty bucks that I couldn’t escape if my hands were cuffed behind my back. I’d let him cuff me, with the bare minimum of flirtatious jokes about bondage. Sam said it was hardly a fair test, given there was nothing nearby I could use to pick the lock. Dean had begrudgingly agreed and provided me with a small piece of wire.

It took half an hour, during which Dean ate pizza and kept smugly offering me some. Even with the limited range of movement and unable to see, I had eventually picked the lock and gotten my right hand free. Dean had even asked me how I’d held the wire to guarantee I wouldn’t drop it. Dean Winchester actually asked me  _ to teach him something _ . That’s how good I was at lockpicking.

So obviously, with my strong hand totally free and able to see what I was doing, I was able to pick the lock on my cuffs in about a minute.

I got to my feet and tried dragging the desk. It was heavy, but it didn’t make a whole lot of noise when I pulled it across the carpet. Unless someone was in a secret basement room directly beneath, I was confident no one would hear me.

Pulling one side and then pushing the other, I managed to work it across the room and with one final push, I got it right up against the door. It was inward opening, and the desk was heavy, so even if they worked out I was gone, it would still be a while before they could come after me.

I hurried back to the window and opened it as far as it would move. It opened so easy, I actually considered it for a few moments before deciding to stick with my original plan.

By moving the desk across the door, I had also placed it under the air vent. As I had suspected while looking at it from the desk, it had one of those coverings over it that was designed to be easily removed for maintenance and stuff. I gripped it and pulled it up and out.

“Fuck.”

The duct underneath was significantly smaller than the vent had suggested. There was at least a few extra inches on all four sides of the plastic covering, obviously designed to make it look more seamless where it sat on the wall. I looked at it for a moment, wondering it the duct got wider or narrower at any point in the building. I still had the option of the window.

I could fit. And if the duct got narrower, I would just have to use the element of surprise to come back out again and kick some ass.

I put the cover just inside and looked around the room. I’d be able to pull myself in forwards from where I was, but then there’d be no space to turn around. I needed to be higher. I scrambled back down and grabbed the sturdy plastic chair I’d been sitting on.

Once I’d lifted it onto the desk, facing the vent, I was able to climb up and then up again. Then I got on my hands and knees, butt towards the vent, so I could crawl in backwards.

Now that I was in, I had to get rid of the chair. I considered just pushing it off, but there’d be a clatter, and they might wonder why I’d done it when they finally got into the room. Better to leave them thinking I’d gone out the window as long as possible. In the end, I reached out and turned the chair around and pushed it to the side so it looked like extra barricading.

It was somewhat tricky to replace the vent cover again. It was a whole load of little squares, with a grey filter thing behind to catch the dust. I took out the filter and poked my fingers through some of the squares, glad my recent weight gain had not included fatter hands. I turned the whole thing back on its side so I could get it on the outside of the duct. Then I turned it the right way around and pulled it flush against the wall.

Getting it off had involved a little jerking movement upwards, so logically putting it back would take a similar movement down. It took me three tries, until I heard a click and felt that it had locked into place.

I considered the filter. Hopefully its absence would not be noticed from inside the room. But maybe I could make use of it. I realised I’d have to move backwards through the duct until I came to somewhere with room to turn, if such a place even existed. Maybe somewhere that branched off into two or three directions?

Keeping quiet as I could, I wiggled so that I could get the filter underneath my stomach. I lifted my knees and used my hands to push myself back as a little test. The even softness of the filter against the smooth metal duct made me glide smoothly and quietly backwards.

Triumphant, I pushed myself back again. The filter had much less friction on the ducts than my jeans would, and it was definitely better to slide along the duct than to crawl. Instead of plonking knees and hands down, over and over, each one risking detection, I could keep my legs up and use carefully placed hands to move more silently. It was quicker than I’d expected too.

At first, I was moving backwards up a slope, as the duct rose up above ceiling height. After that, it was flat and even easier to slide along, though I had to look back occasionally to see what was behind me.

I kept going backwards until I felt something against my feet. I must have reached the end. I was able to see over my shoulder that I was at a T-shaped intersection. Excellent. I lay quietly to see if I could hear any noise.

There were voices, but they seemed to come from all around, rather than any particular direction. Thinking back to what I’d seen of the layout when I arrived, going right ought to take me closer to the the cells. Left probably led to the parking lot, possibly right to the airconditioning unit. Thank goodness it wasn’t summer, or I might have frozen to death.

I had to crawl a little to get myself backed up, but I managed to stay mostly silent. Hopefully any little bangs I’d made would either be drowned out by voices, or put down to some other person in some other room. What with the arrest of two (or three) ruthless killers, the place was pretty busy.

Once I was back on top of the filter, I could propel myself forward easily. I was only a few feet along the duct when I reached a vent. I slid up to it carefully and tried to look down. This vent had its own thick filter that I couldn’t see through. But I could hear.

It was just a bustle of chatter. They were all male, but none of them seemed to be the agent who’d questioned me. I could distinguish at least three different voices. One of them seemed to be talking to someone who either wasn’t replying or spoke very softly. He was saying how exciting this was and how he’d never expected to be involved in anything this dramatic. He might have been on the phone, I speculated.

The other two voices were talking to each other, but they were further away and harder to understand. They were definitely discussing logistics. I heard something about “sooner rather than later” and both men definitely used the word “secure” at least twice. One of them said “Feds”.

The filter could only be removed if I took the vent cover off, and without seeing through it, I had to guess. Given the probable distance of the two men from the vent, the room was of a decent size. That and the direction and distance I’d travelled suggested that I was above the main office area. Not where I needed to be.

I kept following the duct around a corner and I was confident that I was moving towards the cells. If I were building cells, I would definitely make sure any vent was in the guard’s area outside, rather than on the inside of any cell. That was just common sense. But, the architect was unlikely to have factored in a rescue party travelling via the air duct.

A few more pushes forward and I began to hear agitated voices. Both ahead and behind. Something was happening, and everyone was shouting about it. My initial assumption was that my escape had been discovered, but then there was a loud boom. It sounded like something had exploded…

What the hell? Had the boys mounted their own escape? The only way to find out was to keep moving ahead to the cells. I recognised a voice as Dean’s, so I used the cover of shouting to forget the filter and crawl along til I found another vent.

Dean was down there alright. I couldn’t see through this filter either, but the sound of his voice was unmistakeable.

“Why don’t you let us out of here so we can save your asses?”

“From what?” That was definitely the voice of Agent Whatever, the guy who had bought right into my sob stories. “You gonna say demons? Don’t you dare say demons. Let me tell you something. You should be a lot more scared of me.”

Dean didn’t answer him, and then there were footsteps. It sounded like someone was leaving, and since it couldn’t be Dean, it might have been the Fed.

The retreating footsteps faded and then I heard Sam. “How’s the shoulder?”

“It’s awesome,” Dean answered. “I’ll live. You know, if we get out of here alive. So you got a plan?”

Okay, so something had happened to Dean’s shoulder. Something had exploded and now Dean was claiming the cops needed to be saved from something. His silence suggested the Fed had been right and it was demons. So, demons had destroyed something outside, maybe. But why? And what about Dean’s shoulder? What had happened to him? If it was police brutality, then a cop was about to answer to me, and probably to my left hook.

I looked carefully at this new filter. I couldn’t see the layout of the cells, so I didn’t want to kick out the vent and drop down into a row of cells that was in plain sight of a guard, or even the whole central office.

I heard Sam’s voice again. “We need your help. It’s Nancy, right? Nancy, my brother’s been shot.” I became alarmed, but then I realised that must be what was wrong with Dean’s shoulder. He was still talking, so it couldn’t be that serious… Could it? “He’s bleeding really bad. You think maybe you could get us a towel? Please? Just one clean towel? Look. Look at us. We’re not the bad guys, I swear.”

I could see Sam in my mind, exactly the way he’d look, the pleading that would be in his gentle eyes as he spoke to Nancy. She’d get him a towel. No one is immune to Sam’s pleading face.

I thought Dean said something then, but I couldn’t be sure. Nancy sure didn’t speak.

I pulled at the filter. Maybe I could rip it to bits, make a hole? I tried to get my fingers in and really grip a good chunk of it. Then I pulled hard. A little lump of fibres came away in my hand.

While some sort of scuffle went on below; a woman (Nancy?) screaming and a man shouting, I tore at the filter. When I finally got enough away to look down into the room, I saw a cop leading that cute dark haired lady away from the cells and into an adjacent room.

My vent was right above them. I couldn’t see much, but it seemed like there was no door. I had just enough vision to see the start of a corridor to my right, a wall to my forward right and a cell in front of me. I could just about make out a tall dark haired figure standing at the front of the cell.

I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to, to know it was Sam.

I listened to the retreating sounds of Cute Nancy and the cop, wondering what the boys had done to make that poor woman scream like that. If only I’d thought to rip up the filter earlier.

Jumping down was definitely a bad idea, since I had no idea of the layout of the room. But it was quiet. There didn’t seem to be a guard right there. Maybe, if I was very careful, I had a way to find out if the coast was clear.

“Psst…”

I got no reaction from Sam,who seemed to be looking behind him, possibly talking to Dean. Frankly, I thought it was pretty dumb to lock them up in the same cell.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Sam…”

Again, he didn’t hear me, so I risked raising my voice just the tiniest bit. “Sam!”

That time he did hear. I saw him turn his head one way and then the other.

“What?” That was Dean’s voice, somewhere behind him.

“I just heard… Never mind…”

“Sam!” I repeated.

Dean came into view. I just managed to get a glimpse of his head, as he looked up. “No, I hear it, too…”

“Airvent!” I hissed, and both boys looked up towards me. I could now see their eyes and their craning necks.

I could see it when Sam smiled. There was a reason I once called him Sun Drop. His whole face seemed to fill up with light, as his dimples formed and he grinned towards me.

“Hey Pea,” he muttered, like he was talking to Dean.

Dean stepped closer to the bars, squinting up at the vent, and then turning to Sam like he was speaking to him. “Wow, Princess. Still freakin’ nuts.”

“If I kick the vent out and jump down, will anyone see me?” I asked.

“Yes,” Sam said, still like he was just talking to his brother. “But we got bigger problems.”

“Demon problems?”

He nodded. “I can’t… It’s too much to explain. Just… Okay, just wait there and come out when the time comes.”

“Okay,” I promised. “I’ll be here when you need me.”

“Thanks, Pea.”

They both disappeared from my view, but I’d forgotten an important point. “Sam…” I called him back, and he appeared.

“Is Dean okay?”

“He’s had worse.”

With that, I was left to wait.

I stayed where I was, wishing I’d thought to bring some kind of weapon with me from the office. I should have pocketed something that I could use in a fight. Even a pen would have helped. My knife had been taken when they searched me. I sure as hell was gonna take it back, even if I had to go through ten cops to get it.

As I waited, I heard the boys talking. They spoke like they were talking to each other, but I knew the conversation was for my sake.

“Okay, so it’s clear that other Fed was possessed,” said Dean.

“Definitely. For months, probably. Makes sense, use the FBI to find us,” said Sam.

“So he shoots me through the shoulder, then what? What’s the plan?”

Their natural sounding conversation was clearly designed to fill me in on the details.

“Well, he smoked out, so I’m guessing he’s out there now with who knows how many friends.” Sam’s words were accompanied by what sounded like something falling into water.

“Smart move grabbing that chick’s rosary beads,” Dean said, which explained Nancy’s screams.

I waited patiently as Sam used the rosary beads to turn the toilet water into holy water. Then they discussed what the explosion had been. Dean’s bet was that it had been the helicopter the Feds had sent to take them to Nevada, where they were supposed to await trial. Sam agreed that made sense.

At that point, they stopped talking for a few minutes, so either someone had come in that I couldn’t see, or I now knew everything they did.

“We’re like sitting ducks in here,” said Sam, eventually.

“Yeah, I know. Would it kills these cops to…” Dean raised his voice suddenly “BRING US A SNACK!”

“How many you figure are out there?” Sam asked him.

Dean didn’t know.

“However many they are, they could be possessing anyone,” Sam noted. “Anyone could just walk right in.”

“It’s kind of wild, right?” said Dean. “I mean, it’s like they’re coming for us, They’ve never done that before. It’s like we got a contract on us. Think it’s because we’re so awesome? I think it’s cos we’re so awesome.”

I didn’t even need to see him to know exactly what Sam’s face looked like. I smiled. Classic Dean, finding the humour in the worst disasters.

Footsteps approached and a rather fat cop came in and walked beneath me. He stayed within my view as he started to unlock the cell door. I tensed up. This might be the moment I was supposed to wait for. If the guys seemed like they were attacking the cop, I would jump right in.

“Well, howdy there, Sheriff,” said Dean, all fake cheer.

The Sheriff opened the cell door.

“Uh… Sheriff?” Sam sounded disconcerted, worried.

“It’s time to go boys,” the Sheriff said, going into the cell.

Dean sounded almost as nervous as his brother. As he replied, the Fed came in, crossing under my vent. “Uh… you know what? We’re… we’re comfy right here. But thank you.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked the Fed.

“We’re not just gonna sit around here and wait to die,” the Sheriff explained. “We’re gonna make a run for it.”

Oh God no! I wanted to shout from my hiding place.  _ Do NOT try and go out there! _

“It’s safer here,” the Fed said. Thank God.

“There’s a SWAT facility in Boulder.”

The Fed was now lost from my view as he stepped into the cell. “We’re not going anywhere.”

The Sheriff sounded pissed, and I could see why. This was his town and the building was full of his staff. It’d be frustrating to have some Fed tell you how to handle your own job. Sadly though, the Fed was right.

“The hell we’re not.”

There was a sudden gunshot, but I couldn’t see anything.

“Ellie!”

Dean had called to me, so I pushed heavily on the vent. It didn’t move, and I could hear the scuffle below. Then, as I bashed the thing a second time, the cop I’d seen before ran into the room, rifle in his hands.

“Stay back! Dammit! Ellie!”

There was enough noise anyway, and Dean had already called out, so I rolled over onto my stomach, shuffled along so that my feet were over the vent and kicked.

I heard the plastic clatter to the floor, and I jumped straight down after it, feet first.

Bending and straightening my knees to help me take my own weight as I landed, I quickly took in the scene. The Sheriff lay dead on the floor of the cell. Dean had a gun trained on the young cop, who kept wavering, aiming his rifle towards Dean and then me, alternating. Sam had the FBI agent pinned down and was shoving his head into the blessed toilet water.

He was possessed.

Figuring Sam needed the most help, I hurried through into the cell. The demon began to laugh, and it sounded so strange as he spoke with the voice of that serious man he was possessing.

“It’s too late. I already called them. They’re coming.”

Typical demon ritual gloating bullshit. I grabbed his head and shoved it down into the toilet bowl, speaking the exorcism from memory as I did so. Sam was then able to concentrate all his energy on pinning the guy down. It’s hard enough to keep hold of a demon, and Sam was in handcuffs.

Finishing the incantation, I lifted his head back up, wanting to be sure I didn’t drown the poor man. He’d just been possessed, he didn’t need his head in a toilet too. As I held on, he screamed and the black smoke of the demon spewed from his mouth, and into the open air vent.

Sam was now able to let go, and so was I. The Fed fell to the floor, and Sam and I fell into one another. We each helped the other to get back on our feet, while Cute Nancy ran into the cell towards Agent Thingo.

“Is he… is he dead?” she asked, coming over to look at him.

Sam was fine, so I crawled over to the Fed to get a better look at him. As I reached him, my hand on his shoulder, his eyes opened and he began to cough.

His coughs sounded a little spluttery, so I helped him to sit up straight, in case some water had got into his lungs.

“It’s okay,” I said, thumping him on the back. “I got ya, it’s just a little water…”

He coughed up a small amount of liquid, leaning into me as I held onto him. I gave him another whack, and that caused a larger, more watery cough, which seemed to clear him out.

“There we go. You’re gonna be alright.”

“Thanks,” he breathed. “I don’t… I…”

His eyes seemed to focus in on me and he suddenly sat up a fraction straighter, taking his own weight.

“How the hell did you get out of that room?”


	73. Chapter 72: Trouble Brewing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Under siege, Ellie bonds with Nancy over angels and filing. But the demons outside are not the only ones about to cause trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello Ao3 Friends!!! I have been extremely sick the past few weeks, but I'm finally well enough to get back to work. Hope you like it!

“How the hell did you get out of that room?”

Agent Thingo was staring at me as I led him over to the bed. He seemed too focused on me to even notice where I was taking him.

“Air vent,” I said casually, as I got him sitting down.

He coughed again, looking around the room. His eyes seemed to focus on the dead Sheriff and he forgot all about my mysterious appearance in the cell.

“I… I shot the sheriff.”

_No Dean_ , I thought, knowing that with an opening like that, he would not be able to resist himself.

I don’t think he even tried.

“But you didn’t shoot the deputy,” he said, with a smile.

Sam seemed unamused, so I looked busy, examining the FBI agent’s face. It was an inappropriate time for a joke really, but I sympathised with Dean and smiled a little. Honestly, what’s a man supposed to do when he’s given an A+ set-up like that?

The agent didn’t seem to have noticed. “Five minutes ago, I was fine, and then…”

“Let me guess. Some nasty black smoke jammed itself down your throat?” asked Dean.

“You were possessed,” I added.

He stared at me. “Possessed like... possessed?”

_No, possessed like hamburger. What other kind of possessed could I have meant?_

“That’s what it feels like,” said Sam. “Now you know.”

Dean smirked. “I owe you the biggest _I told you so_ ever.”

As he said this, he skillfully flipped the pistol around and passed it back to the Fed.

Apparently, actually being possessed had convinced the guy we were telling the truth, and he asked the young deputy for the keys. He uncuffed Sam and Dean’s wrist and ankle binds and I could see the weight being released just in Sam’s face.

“All right,” asked the Fed. “So, how do we survive?”

 

* * *

 

Dean went with Deputy Phil and Agent Whatever, to look through what weaponry they had available. Meanwhile, Nancy took Sam and I to the storeroom, where there was road salt.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked, as we were led through a narrow corridor. “They weren’t very gentle when they arrested us…”

I nodded my head and gave him a nice bright smile, to prove I was fine. “I might have a little bruise on my knee, but I don’t think it’s worth suing for brutality.”

He responded with a little smile of his own.

“What about you?” I asked. “Those ankle cuffs did not look comfortable.”

“Yeah, but I’m okay. Dean’s the one who got a bullet in the shoulder.”

I frowned then. “You think he’s gonna let me look at it tonight?”

“Before whatever happens happens? I doubt it.”

“In here,” said Nancy, opening the storeroom door for us.

Inside, there were big bags of road salt, 60 pounds each, according to the label. Sam stepped right in and squatted, giving me a view of his obscenely toned ass. With absolutely no apparent effort, he rolled a bag onto its side and then lifted it straight up, like he was just holding a pillow instead of a 60 pound sack of salt.

Some kind of low whimper may actually have passed through my lips with zero permission from my brain. But seriously… he was just picking up 60 pounds like it was nothing. I didn’t quite weigh three times that and I couldn’t stop myself from wondering how easily he’d lift me. And would he do it in one, jerking movement like that? Or would he lift me slowly and cautiously, like I was precious and breakable? And which one would I prefer and _dammit Ellie get your shit together! This is a freakin’ siege!_

I was perfectly able to lift that much weight, though unlike Sam, I’d actually feel it. But I wasn’t sure it was necessary.

“You think we need more?” I asked.

Sam shook his head as he turned around and I swear to God, he didn’t even look like he was straining. “Doubt it. We can always come back.”

“I can lift one,” I said, and it may have come out somewhat defensive.

“I know you can. But seems pointless when this should be plenty.”

“Guess so,” I agreed.

Sam started to head back down the corridor, and it didn’t look like he was even slowed down by the weight in his arms. I didn’t know whether to be jealous of his strength or turned on by it.

Kinda both…

I waited for Nancy to lock up the supply room, trying to get myself focused back on the case. Clearly it had been too long since I’d had sex, but that was a problem I could solve after I got out of this life or death situation.

Although, maybe Sam would be up for some “thank God we’re alive and not in jail” sex???

I closed my eyes for a second and regrouped, as Nancy finished locking the door.

“You okay?” I asked her, as we followed Sam together.

She shook her head. “I just… I can’t believe… I guess I knew there were evil things, demons and monsters. But seeing it happen…”

“Yeah,” I said, sympathetically. I’d known about demons since I was eight (and had my suspicions before that), but I’d seen enough people come to terms with the reality of monsters to get how distressing it was.

“Are… are there angels too?” asked Nancy.

Sam had stolen her rosary, so she was obviously a pretty devout believer. Personally, I didn’t believe in God or angels or Heaven or any of it. But I wasn’t as sceptical of it as Dean was. I’d heard the boys argue, but I was kind of neutral on the issue. If demons and vampires were real, why not angels? And I’d personally fought pagan Gods, so I couldn’t categorically refuse the concept of a Judeo-Christian God. I just hadn’t seen any evidence of one.

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “I never saw anything to make me believe in angels, but who knows? Angels wouldn’t be on Earth killing and possessing people, so I guess I wouldn’t have come across any, you know?”

“But the water? In the toilet… Your friend, the other one, he said something about Holy Water, and I could see it was burning that man’s skin…”

I stopped walking in my tracks. “Huh.” Nancy stopped too, and I gave her elbow a little tap to indicate I was going to start moving again. “I… I never thought of it like that. Gotta be some reason why that stuff works.”

“Angels watch over us,” said Nancy. “Perhaps they hear your prayers and they bless the water for you.”

“Could be,” I agreed.

I had never considered why Holy Water worked. It was possible that the incantations and objects that blessed water were from a much older tradition and that they had been coopted into Christianity. But it was also possible, on the available evidence, that God, as Christians saw him, was real.

After all, I had seen nothing that proved God and his angels were as real as demons or vampires. But then, I hadn’t seen anything that definitely proved they were not.

Besides, if believing in angels helped Nancy get through the night, that belief in itself was a good and protective force. Even if she was wrong, it didn’t matter as long as her belief helped her.

We arrived back in the main office area, the Fed and young Deputy Phil were there, leaning on a desk each and not speaking to one another. They were probably processing. Sam had already started to open the bag, so he could get out the smaller bags and start laying salt lines across the doors and windows. As I came in, I realised something important.

“Sam, I left the window open, in that room I was held in. So they’d think I escaped that way.”

He didn’t look up. “So close it.”

“I barricaded the door…”

He did look up then, with a nod. “With what?”

“A heavy desk… I could go back into the duct and get in that way?”

“Let me see if I can break through the door first. It’ll be quicker.”

The Fed guy rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll help you. Catch,” he said, directly to me and I was ready when he threw a can at me. It was red spray paint. “Dean said to give you this.”

“Thanks,” I nodded. “You two see about that window.”

The young Deputy had been looking out the window, but now he turned to me. “What should I do?”

“Get the salt and run it in a line across all the window and doors. Demons can’t cross salt,” I explained, because my daddy always taught me that if you want someone to do a job proper, they need to understand why they’re doing it.

Sam and the Fed had already left the room, and I didn’t know where Dean was, but he was a big boy, and he would hardly be slacking off at a time like this.

As Nancy and the Deputy started decanting the salt so they could carry it, I figured I’d better make a start on the Devil’s Traps. With one under each window and door, and a line of salt too, that ought to make things a little more demon proof.

“Put salt along each window,” I said. “Leave the doors until I’ve painted next to them, okay?”

I could spraypaint a simple and effective Devil’s Trap in two minutes. There was a limit to how basic you could make it before it stopped working. And of course, free hand spraypainting is not that exact, so for the symbols to work they had to be a certain size, or they just became blobs.

I figured I’d do the office first, and Nancy and Deputy Phil did all the windows while I got the main door sorted.

“What is it?” asked Nancy, looking over as she crossed from one window to another.

“Called a Devil’s Trap,” I said. “Once a demon steps inside, they can’t get back out unless you break the trap. And it’s done.” I got back onto my feet. “Put a line right across the door. Good and thick, we got plenty of salt, so go nuts. How many doors?”

“External?” Nancy asked, stopping for a moment to point towards a corridor. “Just the one out there, opens into the Parking Lot.”

“Great,” I told her as she started to pour down salt across the door. “That’s good, just like that.”

I went out the way she had pointed, checking to see Deputy Phil was laying down enough salt as I passed him. The other door was just past the cells and down a corridor. As I rushed towards it, I could hear heavy repetitive banging nearby. Sam and the Fed must have been trying to get past my barricade.

Oops. How was I supposed to know this would turn into a siege?

I was almost done with the new trap when the banging stopped. Once I was done, I checked down a side corridor, where the noise had come from. I remembered being taken that way when I’d been brought in. Looking up at the roof, I realised I must have been crawling along up there, and these harsh grey corridors were what was below me.

The Fed appeared, having come from a room at the end of the corridor. It was definitely the one I’d been held in.

“We got it down,” he said, as we passed. “I’m gonna help with the salt.”

I nodded as I turned to go into another office. I’d have to get every window in the place done, and that wasn’t going to happen quick.

Two offices done in record time, and just as I finished the second, the Fed came in with salt. We gave each other a nod this time, but we were both in too much hurry to talk.

Sam had moved the desk so I could get into that room easy, but by the time I got there, he was gone. I hurriedly painted another trap. I was getting quicker each time, now that I’d gotten my eye in.

 

* * *

 

Back in the main office, I had done my second last window and was moving towards the last, when I heard Dean’s voice.

“They’re coming!” he yelled. It sounded like he was in the corridor. I got down onto my knees and almost slid the three metres to the final window, finger on the spray trigger as I got there.

I was still painting when there was a loud scream. I was pretty sure it was female, so it had to be Nancy. My urge was to get up and go find her, but I had to get that last trap finished.

So sloppy I even got paint on my knees, I finished the trap and looked up at the window above me. It was dark out, but not a normal stars and moonlight kind of darkness. Slowly, I stood up, leaving my can of paint on the ground as I carefully made sure not to smudge the paint in the brief time before it dried properly.

It was smoke. Black demon smoke was swirling around the building, hitting the window and rushing upward, obviously repelled by the heavy line of salt someone had put down.

Hearing panicked footsteps enter the room, I turned to see both the Winchesters and Nancy running in from the corridors. At least that meant Nancy was okay. The smoke must have just frightened her.

Everything was shaking, and I turned back to the window, avoiding my instinct to hold onto the sill, in case I broke the line. I felt someone approach and stand next to me, and knew without even looking that it was Sam. I shuffled aside so he could look out the window too.

The building shook even more. I’d never been in a real earthquake, and I wondered if this was what it would be like. Only the ground wasn’t moving. I could see the walls shake and the glass rattle in the frame. Dust fell down, dropping from the ceiling and past my eyes on its way down to the ground.

First the lights began to flicker and then they dimmed altogether. The room was darker and still shaking. This time I did reach towards the window, but before I reached it, Sam’s hand was under my elbow, holding me steady.

We rocked along with the building, still looking out the window. The smoke seemed to crackle with blue and pink electricity as it rushed towards the building and up up up…

Then it was gone. The shaking stopped, everything was quiet, and there didn’t seem to be any smoke outside at all.

And it was way creepier.

Sam let go of my elbow and passed me the shotgun he had been holding with his other hand. Clearly, we’d done a good job securing the building against demon smoke. But it wasn’t like that would stop them.

“Everybody okay?” Sam asked.

“Define _okay_ ,” said the Fed. Good point. He was alive and all, but he’d just discovered demons existed and wanted to kill him, and that would make most people feel far from okay.

Sam didn’t answer him, and next thing, Dean was handing around the anti-possession charms.

“They’ll keep you from being possessed,” he explained.

“What about you three?” asked Nancy.

In that weird (but kind of hot) synchronised way of theirs, Sam and Dean pulled down the collars of their shirts to reveal the anti-possession symbols they’d had tattooed on their chests.

“Smart,” said the Fed. Then he looked over at me. “Where’s yours?”

With a smile I just winked at him and he looked at his shoes, cleared his throat and turned back to face Dean again.

Normally the most serious in a crisis, Sam still gave me a little smile. “You’re so bad,” he muttered, out of the corner of his mouth.

My anti-possession tattoo is on my ankle.

 

* * *

 

Nothing happened. It seemed our attackers were off regrouping somewhere. If it were me, I’d have gone looking for some people to possess, try to get in that way. Maybe even look for people who might know Nancy or Deputy Phil or anyone else who they thought might be inside with us. Using familiar faces is always a good tactic, and demons liked it. It was effective enough that even some hunters could be distracted by it. That’s what had happened with Tamara and Isaac, that time. It would probably work even better on someone who’d only just discovered demons existed.

With the demons still outside and us in, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do. Dean had refused to let me look at his gunshot wound for more than about two minutes, determinedly telling me we could deal with it later. Apparently he wasn’t aware infection was a thing, because he wouldn’t even let me wash it. Instead, he started packing some shells with more salt rounds, since there hadn’t been that many in the trunk.

The Fed was with him, in the Sheriff’s office, and it seemed like they were talking, and I couldn’t help wondering what about. Sam paced one room and then the next, looking out the windows and checking the salt lines. He didn’t seem able to sit down, and whenever he tried he would jump up again. Deputy Phil was the same.

Nancy started filing. I got that. There wasn’t anything she could do about our situation, so it made sense to just keep busy with what she _could_ do. I sat on the desk nearby, next to the files.

“Does it make you feel relaxed?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Oh, filing and stuff. I like cataloguing. I find it very calming, it makes me feel peaceful, like everything has its place, you know?”

She nodded, and I handed her the next folder in the pile beside me. “Me too. It takes just the right amount of thought. Not enough that it’s difficult, but enough that you can’t think too much about other things. It narrows your focus.”

Her words were much better than mine, and that was exactly what I liked about cataloguing, and why I enjoyed sorting through and scanning Dad’s library. You don’t have to think too hard, but you have to think just hard enough that your mind can’t wander off into unpleasant or miserable places, so you just end up calmer.

“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” I said, with a smile. Nancy was cute, but she was also real nice and I thought, pretty smart. And brave. “You’re taking all this really well. I mean, the whole demons and monsters thing.”

She shrugged as she headed back to the file cabinet. “I’m scared, but it’s not… It’s not like I can run away, so I guess I’m just dealing with it. Does this sort of thing happen to you a lot?”

I shook my head, as she had now turned around to come back and collect some more folders. “We deal with demons pretty regular, but it’s usually one or maybe two. Once it was seven. But there’s a lot of other stuff too. Ghosts, witches… vampires are a thing.”

Her hand stopped just above the pile of folders and she looked up. “Seriously?”

“Mmhmm.” I nodded, and realised I was biting my bottom lip again. Sam said I had starting doing it when I was nervous, and I was trying to stop. It dried out my lips and made me go through chapstick real fast.

“How come… How did you end up doing this stuff?” she asked, forgetting about her files for a moment.

“My Dad. Mom got killed when I was real little, and Dad started learning about it all so he could protect us.” That was the most basic explanation I could think of.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About your mom. Is your Dad…”

She hesitated, so I just answered for her. “Alive and well in South Dakota. He’s not real happy about me wanting to follow in his footsteps, but he’s getting used to it. Pretty sure he bribed the boys to bring me along so he knew I wouldn’t be fighting solo.”

“You know them because of your Dad?”

“He was friends with their father. Or not friends, maybe… They knew each other anyway. And sometimes the boys would stay at our house a while.”

“I thought maybe you and Sam…” she began.

I laughed. “Nah. He’s a sweetie, but that ain’t ever gonna happen. It’d get messy. But he’s single, ya know, if you’re interested…”

She blushed and looked away from me. “No, I didn’t mean… It’s okay…”

Nancy didn’t seem like a single night of passion sort of girl. And I knew Sam wasn’t interested in even that much. I couldn’t remember him ever telling me straight up that he was afraid of replacing Jess, but I had got that sense from him somehow. I had offered to talk him up to many very attractive ladies that I would happily have spent a night with had their tastes run that way. He always said no thankyou.

Though, of course, Sam certainly would not need my help picking up, if he ever wanted to. I just thought he could do with some stress free meaningless banging, but it wasn’t my business to go setting him up if he didn’t want me to.

“Don’t stress,” I said. “I was joking.”

She gave a relieved little smile, making her whole face light up and for a minute I thought that if Sam did ever want to find someone, this might be the right sort of girl for him. And for me, if I was honest.

“Or was I?” I added, and she laughed, just a little, and softly.

Nancy picked up the next two folders and took them over to the cabinet. But as she walked over there, she became distracted, looking out the window and moving that way, slow and tentative.

“Hey, that’s Jenna Rubner,” she said.

I jumped down off the desk to stand behind her and see properly. The demons had done exactly what I’d thought. A whole crowd of people were standing outside in the street. At least thirty-something, but maybe more. It wasn’t a big town, so it seemed unlikely that this Jenna would be the only possession victim our locals knew.

“That’s not Jenna anymore,” I said, lightly taking her arm under the elbow. She followed me as I started to lead her back towards the office door.

“That’s where all that black demon smoke went?” she asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go see the others.” I picked up my shotgun from the desk chair on my way past. “See if Dean’s got some salt rounds for me.”

“How come demons don’t like salt?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure anyone knows. It’s just something I’ve always known and it works, so I guess I never thought about it.”

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked. “If they get in, I mean. I can’t… I don’t think I could shoot them.”

As we stepped out into the office, I thought about it. If they did get in, even the boys and I wouldn’t be able to do much. We could only shoot so many, and even then we couldn’t kill them.

“Keep wearing that charm,” I said. “And if they get in, hit them with something heavy. If you’re by yourself then scream real loud so we can come help.”

“Is it okay if I just stick with you?” she asked.

“Of course. Let’s find you something solid to wield, and if they get in, you can bash ‘em in the head and then I’ll shoot ‘em while they’re…”

I was cut off by the sound of shattering glass, and I turned and ran right away, towards the source of the noise. It sounded like it had come from one of the little offices at the back. I lost track of Nancy, but Sam, Dean and the Fed (his name turned out to be Henriksen) came from one door or another, all of them just ahead of me.

Dean was first, opening the door into a little break area kitchen. I’d done a Devil’s Trap below the window, just like all the others, but apparently the salt line hadn’t been quite sufficient.

Standing in my Devil’s Trap, a knife in her hand, and covered in blood, was a blonde woman, not unattractive, but with a scowl of disdain. She looked over us, gathered by the doorway, like she was deciding which one to eat first. It would probably be me, judging by the extra scornful way her lip curled at the sight of me.

“How do we kill her?” asked Henriksen, his rifle at the ready, and presumably loaded with salt rounds.

Sam stepped forward, lowering the butt of the rifle as he passed. Dean looked over Henriksen at me, and gave a tiny shake of the head. I knew exactly what it meant, and I responded with a frown and headshake of my own.

“We don’t,” said Sam.

“She’s a demon,” said Henriksen.

Sam shook his own head, but he definitely didn’t mean it the way his brother and I did. “She’s here to help us,” he said.

I’d believe that when I saw it.

It was Ruby.


	74. Chapter 73: What Love Feels Like

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ruby is in the building, and Ellie is not happy about that. Not at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi y'all! As I've explained on tumblr, I've been very unwell lately, so the chapters are kind of slow going. But I'm getting better, so hopefully I'll start being more reliable. <3

“Are you gonna let me out?” asked Ruby, glaring at all three of us like we were in a 90s teen comedy and she was the Cheer Captain forced to interact with the nerds.

I glared back at her, as Sam bent down and scratched some of the paint away, breaking the trap so she could step out. She did so, without seeming the least bit thankful.

“And they say chivalry’s dead. Does anyone have a breath mint? Some guts splattered in my mouth while I was killing my way in here.”

She just marched right on back towards the main office area. Everyone followed her, except Nancy. She was about to, but then she looked over at me, and realised I wasn’t leaving. She came over to help me as I grabbed the salt bag to fix the line back up.

“I’ll do it,” she offered. “You should fix that symbol thing.”

“Thanks,” I said, handing her the bag, and reaching for the spray can I’d left on a table.

“Who is she?” Nancy asked. “And why does he trust her?”

“Long story,” I replied. “She’s this… she _is_ a demon, and she says she’s on our side. Or on Sam’s side at least.”

“But you don’t trust her?” she asked. My tone had hardly been enthusiastic.

“It’s not that she’s a demon, exactly. I guess I can believe that maybe a demon could be on our side. They used to be human so they can have their own agenda or motivations, right? But… there’s just something about her. I trust Sam’s judgement but she’s just… she’s lying to him, I know it.”

“So… you think she’s with them outside?”

I shook my head, squatting down to repaint the trap where Sam had scratched it. “No it’s more… She’s had chances to kill us before and didn’t take them. So, I think whatever she’s up to, it’s more complicated.”

It only took one short spray to fix the circle so the line was unbroken again. I got up, figuring I’d take the paint with me, in case I needed it again.

Nancy had finished the salt line, and she’d done the same good job as on all the other windows. I wondered who had broken the line in the first place.

“So do you think she’ll help us tonight?”

I thought about it. I didn’t know what Ruby’s end game was, but she certainly had gotten us out of trouble before. Even though she’d injured me on purpose, she had done so saving Dean’s life. I was confident that was genuine, and I knew for a fact the potion she’d mixed worked, because I’d used it on my leg. Unless tonight was the culmination of all her plans, it seemed like she’d probably help us out. She needed Sam to keep trusting her, and she wouldn’t be crazy to try and get Dean and I on side, either.

“Probably,” I said. “Whatever she’s up to, she needs Sam alive, and it looks like that lot out there want the opposite.”

As we walked out into the larger office, I could hear Ruby’s annoying smug voice, and see Dean’s face, grimacing at her. I could all but see his arms raised, ready to strangle her. Ruby and Sam had their backs to us, while Henriksen half sat on the edge of a desk, watching them as they argued.

“I’m sorry, I must have blood in my ear,” Ruby was saying. “I thought I just heard you say that you were stupid enough to let the Colt get grabbed out of your thick, clumsy, idiotic hands. Fantastic, this is just peachy!”

Not wanting to deal with Ruby and happy for her to ignore me, I just lingered by the Sheriff’s desk, with Nancy keeping close beside and a little behind me. Coming to the end of her rant, Ruby had turned her back on the boys and wandered over to the window. She passed me as she moved and looked at me for only a moment, but I swear to God himself, I never saw more hate in someone’s eyes. Not before that night and not even since. If hate could burn, I would have heated up so hot and quick that I spontaneously exploded.

“Ruby…”

Sam’s tone was rather more submissive than I would have liked. I figured he was trying to calm her down and all, but he didn’t owe her shit. She said she wanted to help him, so why was she acting like an angry babysitter?

“Shut up,” she said, putting up an agitated hand. “Fine. Since I don’t see that there’s any other option, there’s one other way I know how to get you out of here alive…”

“What’s that?” asked Dean, his own hate evident in his voice.

“I know a spell. I’ll vaporise every demon in a one mile radius. Myself included. So… you let the Colt out of your sight and now I have to die. So next time, be more careful. How’s that for a dying wish?”

A spell to kill every demon outside, _and_ a dead Ruby into the bargain? That sounded like everything we could possibly want. Although, I wondered if it would kill all those vessels, Nancy’s friend Jenna and everyone else. I was about to ask, but Dean spoke quicker.

“Okay, what do we need to do?”

“Aww, you can’t do anything,” she said, smugly. “This spell is very specific. It calls for a person of virtue.”

“I got virtue,” Dean replied and she laughed.

“Nice try. You’re not a virgin.”

Well, where the Hell were we supposed to get a virgin from?

Dean chuckled in disbelief. “Nobody’s a virgin!”

Nancy touched my arm and I turned to look at her. As soon as my eyes focused on her face, she looked away from me, down at her feet.

Well, she was a devout Catholic, and not married. She wasn’t thirty yet, so while I was surprised, I really shouldn’t have been. Not everyone has a sex drive as strong as Dean Winchester’s.

“Really?” I asked her, quietly.

She nodded. “I… it’s a choice…”

“Hey, no judgement,” I assured her, as I gave her a pat on the shoulder.

Ruby had turned now to look at us, and though she still had the sneer and the angry eyes, that look of murderous hate from earlier was gone. Maybe I imagined it, getting paranoid.

“What do I have to do?” Nancy asked.

“You hold still,” Ruby began, “while I cut your heart out of your chest.”

I didn’t even think, my feet just side stepped in front of Nancy, all by themselves, without any involvement from me whatsoever. Virgin sacrifice? Not on my watch!

“What? Are you crazy?” Dean shouted.

“I’m offering a solution.”

“You’re offering to kill somebody,” I said, as Nancy tapped on my arm again.

The way Ruby’s lip curled and the slight smile on her face made me think that she had just been waiting. Waiting for me to get mad at her so she could have an excuse to lay into me.

“What do you think’s gonna happen to this girl when the demons get in?” she asked.

“We’re gonna protect her, that’s what!”

“Very noble,” scoffed Ruby, while Nancy was still meekly, but firmly, tugging at my arm to try and get my attention. “You’re all gonna die. Look, this is the only way…”

“We are _not_ sacrificing anyone,” I said, then I realised who I was talking to. “Or not anyone human anyway.” Ruby I was quite happy to sacrifice.

Ruby gave that annoyed huffing sound again. “What is…”

And then Nancy wasn’t just tapping my arm anymore. She pulled me right around as she shouted. “Would everybody please shut up!”

We were all taken by surprise at the sudden change of tone from Nancy, who up until that point had been polite and rather quiet. Every eye was on her as she let go of my arm and stepped out towards Ruby.

“All the people out there? Will it save them?”

Horrified that we were even having the conversation, I tried to pull Nancy back again. I didn’t want Ruby manipulating her like she did Sam. But she resisted and Ruby looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

“It’ll blow the demons out of their bodies. So if their bodies are okay, yeah…”

I couldn’t see Nancy’s face, just Ruby’s. The demon’s expression was pretty neutral, I guess, but I was sure there was a hint of smugness there, like she was proud of herself. Well, she had nothing to be proud of, making a nice, somewhat naive person think she had to die for the greater good.

“I’ll do it,” said Nancy, with a nod.

Dean, Henriksen and I all spoke at once, an incoherent jumble of “no” and “hell no” and “fuck that”.

“You don’t need to do this,” Dean said at last.

But Nancy just sort of shrugged as she turned back, and I could see no fear on her face. “All my friends are out there.”

“We don’t sacrifice people,” Hendriksen said. “We do that, we’re no better than them.”

I agreed so enthusiastically I pointed a finger towards him and almost pulled the rest of my body after it. “What he said!”

“We don’t have a choice,” said Ruby, and she was lucky I had moved away from her, or she might have discovered how much power there was in my right foot. I could easily hit her in the gut if I wanted.

I had moved across the room in agitation and I was now standing near Dean. He put one hand on my shoulder for a brief moment before he stepped forward. “Yeah well, your choice is not a choice.”

Ruby ignored him and looked to Sam. “Sam, you know I’m right.”

We all turned towards him, but he didn’t say anything, just stood there with a grave expression, the little tick in his jaw just visible.

“Sam?” asked Dean.

Still, Sam didn’t reply.

“Sam?” I looked into his eyes, waiting for him to say something. Anything.

But he didn’t.

That’s when I kinda lost it. Well, I say I “kinda”... But it was more like definitely. Definitely, undeniably, categorically, earth-shudderingly lost it.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

My words of protest were meant to come out as a loud frustrated shout, but they ended up more of a screech, loud and piercing enough to rival an angry banshee. By the time I’d got the whole “sentence” out, I was already halfway to the door that led out of the office and back to the corridor.

Maybe someone came after me, maybe they didn’t, but I never noticed. I wasn’t interested in being followed or comforted or making the whole situation about me. I just wanted to get out of that room and away from Ruby. And Sam.

I didn’t want to be there when Sam agreed to murdering a virgin, whether she had volunteered or not. Like Henriksen said, if we started with the sacrificing and shit, we weren’t any better than they were.

I went back into that office, the same one where I’d been when they had me cuffed to the desk. Closing the door after me, I went to the window and checked the salt line, just for something to do. But that only took a few seconds.

The devil’s trap was fine. I’d done a good job with that one, despite being rushed. The desk was sort of busted, presumably from Sam bursting through after I’d barricaded it. I wasn’t sure it would take my weight. The chairs were not comfy. So I just sat down inside the trap, my knees bent and my back up against the wall below the window. My head didn’t reach the level of the window, so there was no risk of accidentally breaking the salt line.

That made me think of Ruby’s own surprise entrance. Who had broken that line? A nagging, traitorous feeling in the pit of my stomach said that maybe it was Sam. On purpose.

That wasn’t fair, was it? He wouldn’t do that… But then, Agent Henriksen had given all our stuff back, so maybe he’d texted her or something and then left a little break in the line so she could get in and…

And what exactly?

It seemed unlikely that Sam would risk all our lives by making an opening for Ruby, just so she could advocate for human sacrifice.

Since we had been given back our stuff, I found myself absently reaching into my pocket and pulling out my knife; the pink flick knife Sam had given me. After I’d lost the blade in my vampire stalker’s thigh, we’d had it replaced by a rather confused but obliging man who did his best to make it as strong as possible. He didn’t really see why anyone would want a silver-bladed flick knife, but we were paying, so he didn’t care.

Sometimes I liked to get the knife out and flick it open. It was extremely sharp and I sort of enjoyed spinning and flipping it in my hands, even though I knew there was the potential for me to cut myself pretty bad if I dropped focus for a moment. Dean was always telling me to be careful, Princess, and that he wasn’t going to take me to the hospital if I cut my own thumb off. But he always said it with a slight smile that he would definitely deny.

I threw the knife up so that it would spin and then I caught it, easily keeping the blade away from my hand. Another little spin, another catch, and it took some concentration to focus on the knife, and that took what energy I had to focus on the alternative.

Maybe I was overreacting, but I had more than a moral objection to cutting open virginal girls for the sake of weird demon rituals. I could pretend all I liked that my outrage was entirely about poor Nancy, but that wasn’t exactly true.

I kept catching the knife, until it didn’t flip quite right. The key to not being injured was to know when to back out, so I quickly pulled my hand back and let the knife plop down onto the carpet. It landed at entirely the wrong angle, and had I tried to catch it, I might well have cut myself.

I reached to pick it up with my left hand, leaning forward a little and feeling my stomach muscles tighten as I moved. Once I had the knife I sat up straight again, but now I was thinking about my belly. The knife still in my stronger hand, I lifted my shirt with my other and looked down at the pale flesh of my stomach. I didn’t exactly hide the scarring, but I didn’t go out of my way to wear midriff-exposing tops either. The result was not much of a tan on my stomach.

I could have passed it off as a stretch-mark, really. Truth was I was pretty lucky. Since taking me to the hospital would have involved a lot of questions Dad couldn’t answer, he was afraid I’d get taken away from him. He would have taken me anyway, but he didn’t need to. Fortunately, after he cleaned my wound up and bandaged me and all, it turned out not to be so bad. It was a big cut but not too deep, and Rufus said I wouldn’t need stitches. Dad believed him cos he seemed like a guy who’d seen a lot and knew what he was talking about.

So, I’d been bandaged up good and clean and tight, and the wound had healed itself. Because I was so little and had a lot of growing left, the scar had got less and less obvious over the years. Because I’d grown both taller and wider, it had stretched as well as faded.

I ran my fingers across it, feeling the tiniest little dip where it puckered, the skin on my stomach not quite healing back together neatly. The scar was quite a bit shorter than the original wound, according to Dad. It was off centre, too, which I reckoned was probably because the knife dug deeper as I got sliced from left to right.

Sometimes I wondered if maybe the wound wasn’t meant to be deep, and so did Dad. It seemed strange that they’d hold back from killing me, but either of those demons in our yard could easily kill me outright and they didn’t. Rufus said maybe it was because the ritual called for a slow blood-letting, although he thought cutting into the stomach was not really the best way of achieving that.

I was still looking down at my belly, my finger tips absently rubbing at the scar, when I heard footsteps. Looking up, I found Dean peeping round the door frame, frowning, his feet carefully outside in the corridor.

“It’s okay, come in,” I told him, pulling my top back down over my midriff.

As he came in, I started tossing and flipping my knife again. For all he teased me, he must have been confident in my reflexes, because he sat down directly beside me. On the right though, perhaps to have just a little extra distance from the sharp blade.

“We’re not doing it,” he said. “I ain’t crossing that line.”

Still concentrating on my knife, I nodded a little. “Good.”

“He wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

I shrugged as I caught the knife by the handle. “Yeah, okay.”

I didn’t throw my knife up again. I just took the blunt edge of the blade in one hand and the handle in the other, holding it in place as I stared at it.

We sat like that together for a while. I didn’t know how long. I was just focused on the shape of my knife, handle curving out and blade curving in so that they fitted together perfectly. Sam gave me the knife, so sometimes I liked to think of me as the sturdy, reliable pink handle, and him as the fast-moving, deadly silver blade. Because when he and I worked together, without Dean, that’s what we were like. Two pieces of a knife, fitting perfectly together and complementing each other.

Or at least we used to.

Before he started listening to Ruby.

“Ellie?” I looked up to find Dean was watching my knife too, leaning into me as I spun it around in my hands.

“Yeah?”

“You in love with my brother?”

Snapping the blade back into the handle, I looked up at him. For God’s sake, can’t a woman be worried about her best friend without it being a romantic comedy plot?

“No.”

He held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, just checking, Princess…”

“You already asked me like two months ago!” I reminded him.

His frown changed into a sudden smirk. “Lot can happen in two months, kid.”

“Yeah, well it hasn’t happened here.”

I had leant forward away from the wall in my agitation, but now I sank back against it. I definitely wasn’t in love with Sam. I’d been in love a bunch of times, and it felt different. Love, the kind Dean meant, makes you excited, all butterflies and giggles and twirling your hair. It makes you awkward and tongue-tied, blushing and stumbling as you try to be everything they want you to be. I was never tongue-tied around Sam, or at least, not when he was fully clothed. I didn’t try to impress him or worry about who I was and what he wanted me to be.

I loved my friend, but it wasn’t like that at all. Most of the time, when he wasn’t contemplating human sacrifice, Sam was more like… home. He wasn’t butterflies in the stomach, he was hearty stew, warm and filling. He didn’t make me giggle and twirl my hair while my brain forgot to work. He just made me smile. I wasn’t tongue-tied with Sam, I was the opposite. I could say anything to him, knowing he would listen and understand, and still love me after.

That definitely wasn’t what romantic felt like… But to be honest, it was kind of better…

“Would you tell me?” Dean asked. “If it did happen?”

I turned my head to look at him, and saw nothing but sincerity in his green eyes, and the tiny creases above his nose. He wasn’t always a man to hold eye contact, but he did, and it was me that looked away first.

“I dunno,” I said. “What’s to say it’d be Sam? Maybe I’ll be in love with you. Maybe I already am…”

His straight, soft lips widened out into a smile, and for the first time, I noticed that he had dimples too, like his brother. I wondered how I’d never noticed before, even when I was a kid and obsessed with him.

“Nah,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulder. “Hot chick like you, falling for me twice in one lifetime? I ain’t that lucky.”

That made me smile too, and I let myself lean into him. I felt him shift to take my weight, and his arm tightened around my shoulders.

“I don’t like it either,” he said, not exactly a whisper, but quiet enough that even if there’d been others in the room, it would still have been just between us.

“She’s making him like this,” I replied, my head settling into the curve of his neck. “I don’t like ruthless, pragmatic Sam.”

“I know, Princess. So, let’s show him another way, huh? Prove that demon bitch wrong?”

I gripped tight onto my knife and let him hold me for a minute before I could find my voice to reply. We had to. Maybe we could turn this into a good thing, show Sam that Ruby’s way was not the right one.

“You really don’t think he’d have done it?” I asked.

I felt his head shake above me. “No way. Even if she talked him into it, one little pout from you and he’d change his mind.”

I pulled away, and gave him a playful little slap in the shoulder. “I don’t pout!”

“Whatever you say, Princess.” He started to get up, and offered me a hand to pull me up with him. “Come on, I got a plan.”


	75. Chapter 74: Fighting Evil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is in a fight but also she is in another fight...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry I haven't posted a lot of new chapters lately. I've been very ill, but I'm getting better!

“Ellie, uh… I think you should do it…”

After Dean had filled me in on the plan, I’d started painting some traps by a few key internal doors. Nancy came along with me, laying down salt for extra security.

We were back in the main office area, and I was trying to ignore the daggers in Ruby’s eyes. I could feel them even with my back to her. She didn’t even speak to me, just watched, but I could sense the hate emanating off her. Sam had been off working on his part, but Dean was in the office too, taking Henriksen and Deputy Phil through some basics. Ruby was just sitting there, on the dead Sheriff’s desk, quietly hating me.

Now Sam was standing near me as he dared, nervously soliciting my help.

“Yeah, great idea,” muttered Ruby, at a volume level that seemed designed to pretend like it was a whisper, while still being loud enough that I could hear. “Sub in Princess Plaid for the crucial play…”

I ignored her as I finished off the last sigil in my trap.

“ _Ellie_ does it best,” said Dean. “And I thought you said this isn’t gonna work anyway.”

“It’s not,” said Ruby.

“Good thing we don’t care what you think,” I snapped, standing upright again. “Okay, let’s go.”

I threw the spray can into the bin. I wasn’t going to get anything else out of it, and we didn’t have the time anyway. If we got out of this thing alive, we’d have to restock. And we could get out alive. I thought Dean’s plan was actually really clever.

I headed to follow Sam out to the backroom he’d been working in. But Ruby wasn’t done being a bitch.

“Well, this is gonna be a disaster,” she said. “I’m out.”

Sam and I both turned around to see she had gotten off her ass and was straightening out her jacket ready to leave.

“You’re not even gonna help?”

She scoffed. “Hey. I was gonna kill myself to help you win. I’m not gonna stand here and watch you lose.” She took a step closer to Sam. “And I’m disappointed because I tried. I really did. But I clearly bet on the wrong horse.”

I snapped again. Guess I have a short temper. “Yeah, you picked a guy who doesn’t want to murder someone to save himself. Bad call.”

She raised one eyebrow, a sneering smile on her lips. “Whatever you say, White Trash. Sam, are you gonna let me out?”

He looked at me, like he wanted my permission to let her out or something. I wasn’t the boss of him. He could let her out or in or whatever the hell he wanted. I just turned my back on them both and started heading for the corridor.

Behind me, I could hear her still talking.

“You know I’m right, Sam. And you’d admit it if you weren’t trying to bang your pain in the ass little groupie.”

I didn’t wait to hear how Sam responded to her nonsense. I wasn’t a pain in the ass and I definitely wasn’t a groupie. Ruby was the one who kept miraculously showing up wherever Sam went, like some kind of creepy demon stalker. And if Sam was trying to bang me, he wasn’t trying very hard, since all I’d have needed was the slightest hint and I’d be on him before he could finish speaking. In a casual, strictly physical kind of way, obviously.

By the time I got to the audio room, he had used his longer legs to catch up with me.

“Fine,” I said, gesturing at the station’s crappy looking PA system. “Let’s do this thing.”

“Ellie, I’m…”

“It doesn’t matter, let’s just get it done.”

There must have been something about my tone that stopped him trying again. Instead he just stepped around me over to the desk, picking up a microphone.

“Okay, I’ll press record and then wait a second or two and start.”

I waved a hand and nodded, so he would know I understood, because I was not some kind of moron who didn’t know how a tape recorder worked.

He handed me the microphone and when I had a good grip on it and was ready, he pressed the record button.

I waited a good few seconds, looking down at the spinning reels of the crappy old tape. I was focused on that, but I could still tell, somehow, that Sam was watching me. I didn’t know what to say to him about Ruby, so I figured I’d finish the recording and leave. Avoiding your problems: it’s the Singer way.

After a couple beats I started the recitation. “Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio…”

 

* * *

 

Dean had tried to convince me that taking a rifle and covering him and Sam was the most appropriate use of my energy. I’d laughed. I preferred not to use a gun and I was never going to be relegated to backup.

I had promised Nancy she could stick by me, but in the end, she wanted to help with the trap. She and Deputy Phil were going to rush outside and get salt around the doors so that once the demon army had walked into our trap, they wouldn’t be able to get out again.

Since I didn’t have to take care of Nancy, I grabbed a bag of salt and told Dean to load me up with holy water. There were only two external doors, so Sam and Henriksen took the corridor, while Dean and I covered the main door into the office area. Nancy and Phil were up on the roof, waiting for the hoard to come inside, so that they could seal them in. Talk about badass, the pair of them hadn’t even known demons existed two hours ago. Now they were possibly the key element to the whole plan.

Dean’s plan was a good one, and I was pretty confident it would work. Whatever Ruby thought, it’s always worth trying to save lives, even one life. Maybe sacrificing Nancy to some weird ritual wouldn’t matter so much to the big picture. We’d still be hunting every day, and saving far more lives than we’d taken.

But it mattered to me. Forget the big picture, I didn’t ever want to be someone who would sacrifice a person’s life because it was easier or safer. I was never going to be that person, and I didn’t want my friends to be that person either. Every life is important and Nancy deserved to be safe and alive just as much as her possessed friend outside.

Salt rounds slung across his chest and shoulder, Dean looked ready to invade a small European nation. It was a good look for him, adding to that tough, edgy, rugged thing he had going on. I’ll be honest… he was looking damn fine.

“You okay, Princess?”

I nodded, gripping onto my salt bag. I had a holy water flask in each pocket, and if it came to it, my flick knife in my bra.

“Fling salt at ‘em?” Dean asked. “That’s your whole plan?”

I replied to him with nothing but a shrug. I’d once forced a semi-corporeal poltergeist to swallow salt. Demons weren’t gonna be a problem.

He smiled. “So freakin’ nuts.” Then he called out to the others.

There were yells of “yeah” and “ready” from Sam and Henriksen out in the corridor.

“Let’s do this,” yelled Dean, and he and I ran forward in unison.

We reached the door together, and I kicked at the salt line while he used his boot to rub away the paint on my Devil’s Trap. Then we both grabbed one of the double doors and pulled.

Side by side we took a couple of steps backward and waited. His rifle was ready and waiting to shoot immediately. Of course, he didn’t actually want to stop the demons from coming in, but he had to make it seem believable or they’d realise we were planning to trap them.

There were maybe thirty possessed locals crowded close to the door and they rushed forward as one. Dean’s rifle went off in an instant, and I saw the salt round hit a guy in the front, throwing him backward a little. His friends just swarmed around and ahead of him. I heard Dean’s rifle go off a second time, and then I was in the middle of it.

The first one to reach me was possessing a pretty rough looking trucker type. He was a big guy, but that didn’t make much difference, since he’d be beefed up with demon strength anyway.

I had both hands on my salt bag so I couldn’t just punch him, but all my strength was in my legs. And anyway, a half empty bag with a kilo of salt in it is way better than a fist. I’d been ready so my grip was already tight and he wasn’t even able to touch me before I threw all my strength behind my swing and smashed the bag into his face. He fell back into another demon and a third sidestepped them to rush me, and I caught him on the backswing.

Dean fired off more rounds, giving me time to turn and start running. The idea was to get them deeper into the building. I could definitely hear footsteps running behind me and I knew they weren’t Dean’s. He was supposed to stay between the demons and the door so that they went after me instead of back outside.

I adjusted the salt bag as I ran, cradling my right arm around it so that I could reach in with my left hand. I caught a vague glimpse of Sam, much taller than either the woman or man rushing him, but probably not as strong. I didn’t have the chance to help him, as a hand connected with my hair and I was jerked backwards.

I turned around fast enough that the demon lost grip. While turning, I reached into my salt bag. Lifting out the handful, I flung it directly into her eyes. She stumbled and before she could get up, I’d already thrown another handful at her.

“Ellie!”

I delivered a quick kick to my attacker’s chest, using it as an opportunity to pivot around to face Sam, who had apparently knocked out one demon, and only found himself with worse problems. Using the body of a woman shorter than me, a demon had him by the throat. He was forced up against the wall, still on his feet, and struggling. I only had a quick moment to look, but it seemed like a stalemate. He was just strong enough to stay upright and she was only just strong enough to keep him held. It didn’t look like either was gaining the upper hand.

I grabbed another huge handful of salt and let the bag drop to the ground. I was only two steps away from Sam and the short demon. Realising she would have to fight me off, the demon lost concentration for a second as she saw me coming. That second was long enough for Sam to push her away from him and into me. I aimed at her gut, the most natural height for me, so I got plenty of power behind the kick. It didn’t knock her off her feet, but it did send her stumbling backwards into the wall.

I rushed at her, no idea what Sam was even doing by that point. She was still reeling from the kick when I used my salt filled left hand to punch her in the temple. That weakened her enough for me to grab hold of her hair with my other hand and tip her whole head back.

The second her mouth opened from the shock, I shoved my salt-filled fist into her face and let go. As I’d hoped, the great majority went down her throat, making her scream and then gag.

Now I’d thrown down my salt, I only had the holy water left. I grabbed one of the flasks from my pocket. Sam was already running back into the main office, so I followed him. I could hear Dean, not screaming or calling for help, but definitely grunting pretty loudly, suggesting he was having some trouble.

Opening the flask as I ran, I hurried behind Sam, only to arrive at the worst possible moment. A group of demons had cornered the boys and as one of them raised her hand to throw them into the wall, she caught sight of me, and I went backwards too.

I tried to flick the holy water at her as I hit the wall beside Sam, but if any of it hit her, it wasn’t enough to make her flinch.

“Henriksen NOW!” Dean called out.

It felt like something heavy was pushing me against the wall, squeezing me tighter and tighter so it got harder to breathe. The invisible force of the demon was crushing into me. I tried to yell for Henriksen in case he hadn’t heard Dean, but my lungs were so squished I couldn’t get out anything but a vague rasping sound.

Then I heard myself. There was a little crackle of the speakers before my voice came out speaking what, I think I’m entitled to say, was confident and fluid Latin. Some of the demons in the office threw their arms up to cover their ears.

The demon holding the three of us to the wall looked around her, and maybe the pressure eased off me just a little, but not enough for me to get free. Even when she covered her own ears, I was still stuck. I looked over at at the guys and they were pinned too.

Realising what was happening, the possessed folks ran for the door, banging on it, only to find they could not pass the salt line that Nancy and Deputy Phil had laid down.

As I made another attempt to pull myself free, the first of the demons smoked out. The guy it had been possessing collapsed as the black smoke poured out of his mouth and up towards the ceiling. It was still going when the woman beside him dropped and as she started to vomit up the thing inside her, several others did the same. There must have been at least ten in the room and they all crumpled down as the demons controlling them jumped ship.

As we watched, the smoke got thicker and thicker in the air, moving in swirls on the ceiling; maybe they were trying to escape upward. But even demons can’t usually move through solids, so there was no way out. The smoke spun round and round, like a black tornado, flickering with that purple lightning stuff, just like the hundreds of demons that flew out of Hell itself.

They swirled and churned about up there until suddenly there was a bright light, a flash of yellow that suddenly became flame. In high school, a teacher showed us how fire sucks up oxygen to feed itself. The flames looked like that, with the black smoke as oxygen that fed a ring of orange fire that got bigger and bigger until all the smoke was gone and then BAM, just like the fire with no oxygen left, it was all gone.

I’d been watching the flames so I was taken a little by surprise when I suddenly fell and hit the floor. I just dropped down vertically and hit my butt on the ground. Sam and Dean had done the same, letting out a synchronised groan of exhaustion. It’s real rough being held by demon power like that.

“You okay?” Sam asked, turning to look at me.

I didn’t really have the breath to answer, so I just nodded as I kept taking deep breaths to get some air back into my poor aching lungs. The boys gave each other a little nod, which I guessed meant they were both fine.

All three of us grunted and groaned as we got to our feet and across the room. My voice was still reciting the exorcism over the loudspeakers.

“Guess you’re not the only one who hates the sound of my voice,” I said, as I stumbled into Dean.

He reached an arm out to stop me falling and flashed me the special smile he always had when he teased me, ever since we were kids. “Forget exorcism, you coulda just sung to them,” he grinned. “That’d make me vomit up smoke.”

I poked my tongue out at him. Rude! 

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t long after that before Henriksen told us to get the hell out of dodge. He said he’d deal with the locals who’d been possessed, and come up with the most plausible story he could about what went down. He’d make the boys dead, and as for me, I escaped during the commotion.

Nancy came with us to the car. While Sam and Dean were getting everything into the trunk she gave me a little hug.

“Thankyou,” she said.

She was so nice and her hug was a good one, warm and strong.

I shrugged as she let go. “Well, we had to save our own asses too, so it wasn’t really…”

She smiled. “No, I mean for staying with me before and talking me through everything.”

“That’s what Ellie does,” Dean said, coming over. “She’s everyone’s mom.”

The noise I made was sort of half gasp and half laugh. “I am not!”

Dean just grinned and gave Nancy a pat on the shoulder before heading for the driver’s door. Sam was already getting in the car.

Nancy quickly reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here, email me, okay?”

I took the paper from her and she watched me fold it up and put it in my pocket. “Sure. I want to hear how Agent Henriksen explains all this. It’ll have to be a good story!”

She smiled, and then pointed. Dean was gesturing at me from the car. He’d started the engine running.

“Okay, gotta go,” I said, and hurried to open my door and clamber in.

“Be safe!” Nancy called after me, as I got myself upright and pulled the door shut.

“She gave you her number, huh?” Dean asked, looking over his shoulder at the back window (and me) while he reversed. “You gonna take her for dinner first, or just hook up right away?”

The thought had crossed my mind to wonder if maybe Nancy wanted me to email for reasons she wasn’t saying openly. I was definitely going to write her anyway, because she was nice and I’d really connected with her. But she was super cute.

How could Dean have known that? My first thought was that Sam had betrayed me, but I pushed it away again. Whatever difference of opinion we had, he would never tell my secrets to his brother.

I don’t know how long I stared at Dean in shock, but he was back facing front and shifting gear.

“Relax, Princess, I’m kidding.” Then he paused. “It’s good though,” he went on. I didn’t answer, unsure and concerned about what he meant. “The way you talk to people. Dunno how you do it, but you make people feel better.”

“Oh…” I said, not used to praise from Dean and still reeling from the panic just beforehand. “Oh… yeah. I like people.”

Apparently, Dean had reached his chick-flick moment limit, as he immediately changed the subject to Henriksen and what kind of story he might use to explain the whole thing. He and I discussed that with enthusiasm.

Sam didn’t speak at all. He just looked out his window, thinking deeply about something. I hoped he was reconsidering his position on virgin sacrifice. We had shown him that Ruby’s way was the wrong one. It was funny really, what with Ruby being a demon… Because it felt kinda like I was fighting her for his soul.


	76. Chapter 75: Building Bridges

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a fight with Sam, Ellie decides she’s going to mend fences with Ruby. Seriously.

We only ran two towns further down the highway. It wasn’t like there’d be anyone looking for us, what with how we’d just died in a helicopter explosion. Dean drove around looking for the crappiest motel in town.

We settled for a place that seemed like it had a reasonable level of hygiene, but it hadn’t been redecorated since the mid 70s. There were beds and a bathroom. The place was one and a half stars, and the half was probably just because there was a genuine TV and it could get reception.

It was almost 3am, but none of us felt like sleeping. Dean took a lengthy shower, while I got my laptop out and commandeered his bed. Sam sat on the other bed, looking at his phone. He didn’t speak to me and I didn’t speak to him. I wanted to. I just didn’t know what to say.

But Dean was still in the shower after half an hour, and without him to break the tension, the room was filling up with silence, and that silence was heavy. I could feel it, pushing down, crushing me.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I lifted the computer off my knees and set it carefully on the bed. We had no beer, and the only taps were in the bathroom, so I couldn’t even fetch myself a drink of potentially contaminated water. But I had to do something, occupy myself somehow, so I could avoid watching Sam and hoping he’d be the one to talk first.

I decided to get my sleeping area ready, so I grabbed the bed roll and started to lay it out flat. It had got kinda crushed in the car, so I had a bit of a job to make it behave. Every time I’d get one end nice and flat, the other end would try to fold itself in half.

Kneeling on one end, I reached across to try and get hold of the other two corners and push them flat. But as I got there, I saw another pair of hands.

Sam got down onto his knees and put all of his weight on the mat, so it would submit to my will. He looked at me as though he was about to open his mouth, but he didn’t say anything. He must have changed his mind. But if neither of us spoke soon, I was going to explode.

“Um…”

“Ellie…”

We ended up talking at the same time. It was so unlikely, given our previous half hour of total silence, that we would both try to speak at the exact same moment.

I didn’t really have anything useful to say, but judging by the crinkle between his eyebrows, he wanted to say his thing, so I nodded at him to speak.

“You can’t be mad at me for what you think is in my head,” he said.

I stared at him in total astonishment. I’d been worried for him, but not mad. I was mad at Ruby, sure, but I wasn’t mad at Sam. Was I?

“Um… I…” I couldn’t even get out two full words, I was so unsure of myself. I had been kind of short with him ever since Ruby had announced her virgin sacrifice plan.

There was a pause so long he must have realised he wouldn’t be interrupting me because I couldn’t talk. “I didn’t tell Ruby no right away, but you’re acting like I agreed with her about killing that girl. And I didn’t.”

The way he called her “that girl” annoyed me. It was so impersonal, like she was more of an abstract concept than a real human person.

“Her name’s Nancy!” I snapped.

“I wouldn't have let Ruby kill her,” he insisted again, ignoring my interruption.

“Then why didn't you just tell her no, right out? How could you even _think_ about something like that.”

“Because sometimes I think before I speak,” he said. “You should try it!”

I don't even know what words exist to describe my face. Sam and I had our disagreements on occasion, like when I said a death was “cool” or when he left a mess in the bathroom. But he'd never said anything like that to me before. And anyway, I did think before I spoke.

Usually.

Sometimes.

I was hit by a sudden desire to be nowhere near him and was propelled onto my feet by pure shock.

“What was there to think about?!” I asked, so unable to process that he’d insulted me, I just focused on the rest of what he'd said.

“How to word it?” he suggested. “Whether there was another option? What argument to use? How to convince her? Maybe you have the luxury of yelling at everyone, but I need to keep Ruby on side.”

Oh, he thought I yelled at everyone, did he? Well apparently he wanted a demonstration.

“Why?!” I demanded. “We hunt demons, Sam! That's kind of our whole deal!”

I regretted it immediately. I'd told Sam I believed demons really could be potentially good and I'd meant it. But if there was a good demon somewhere on earth, it was not Ruby.

Now I'd said it, and I couldn't take it back.

His expression flashed from angry to… something else… it was only for a moment but I thought it was pain. Real physical agony flashed in his eyes and jawline for just a moment. Then he went back to angry again.

“Do you even care that Dean’s contract is due? He’s got less than three months and we’ve got nothing…”

“And what does Ruby have?” I demanded. “She says she can help but what has she actually _done_?”

“Apart from that time she saved his life, you mean?”

That remark just agitated me further, because without Ruby’s sudden appearance, Dean probably would have died that night. I still resented that she’d popped my stitches in the process, but I had no way of countering Sam’s point, because she really did make a difference.

And all I’d done was sit there telling him how to breathe.

I changed the subject.

“So you think because she helped out a little, she has the right to march in on our business trying to kill virgins?”

“I would have told her no, okay?! How could you even think I’d agree to that? Don’t you know me at all?”

“I… um…” I spluttered, my tongue flailing wildly for a way to counter him. “I don’t what you’ll do anymore! Didn’t you say you wanted to be tougher, more pragmatic, like Dean?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but Dean said no. And I would have too, if you’d given me time.”

“I don’t like it,” I said, telling him straight up. “I don’t like what you’re… what she’s turning you into!”

“So?” he asked. “Since when is it your business what goes on in my head?”

“Since always,” I said. My back was to the bathroom door, so I didn’t see it open. “You’re my friend and I care about what happens to you.”

“Yeah? Seems like a friend wouldn’t be judging me all the time! I don’t get what your standards are, but I know I can’t live up to them!”

“Hey hey, whoa…” said Dean.

He had come out of the bathroom, fully dressed in a new pair of jeans and black t-shirt. He’d wear them until he went to bed and then use them again in the morning since they’d still be basically clean.

Coming in between us, he held up a hand to each of us, looking at me with eyes wide and brows raised. “What the hell?”

“It’s none of your business!” I snapped.

Sam had backed up and turned around. He was now pacing the floor behind his brother, who turned to face me properly. “I gotta be in a car with you two all day tomorrow. You think I want you trying to kill each other? That sound like it’d be fun for me?”

It was bullshit. Dean had agreed with me about Sam being kinda weird, and now he was playing the neutral referee, hanging me out to dry.

Screw him and screw his stupid brother.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

Before either of them could say anything in response, I had grabbed my jacket from a chair, and was hastily pulling it on as I hurried to the door. Sam seemed to realise what was happening just as I got my hand on the door knob.

“Shit, come on Ellie, don’t…”

I gave him a glare that was probably not scary but definitely was childish. I ripped the door open and stepped out into the cold night. I heard Sam call my name again, and then the door slammed shut behind me.

It was freezing out. Worse than freezing. Temperatures had risen just above 32 during the day, but now the sun’s warmth had been gone so long, it was nearly dawn again. Even with my jacket on and my hands stuffed deep down into the pockets, the chill was still enough to hurt. I had no scarf or hat and my collar wasn’t wide enough to turn up.

I didn’t care. I preferred to feel frost forming on my eyelids than to stay in that room any longer, being accused of poor friendship. How was it not my business how Sam behaved? He was my friend and you’re supposed to look out for your friends. Whatever Ruby was up to, it would all end in pain. I was just looking out for him. But she’d spotted his weakness and conned him with promises of saving his brother.

And what about Dean, anyhow? He may have pretended like he didn’t care and he was taking his impending death all stoically, but I saw right through that. He was trying not to allow himself to get his hopes up. But I was sure Ruby’s vague promises that there was a way must have meant something to him. Of course they did. He didn’t want to die and he certainly didn’t want to go to Hell.

It wasn’t fair to give Dean a vague hope of reprieve. That’s why Sam and I had started looking into it on the quiet in the first place. Now Ruby had promised Sam something she’d probably never deliver. He’d stopped looking for answers with me, and focused on doing what she wanted. Maybe there was some solution we’d never find, thanks to her.

I was so cold I instinctively walked along the walls, past the storefronts. It was more a suburb of Colorado Springs than a town. We’d picked a motel a few streets from the highway, and the area was on the poorer side of average. There were a couple of little take-out places that looked too small for a whole kitchen. There was a party supply store with big bright balloons and a clown outfit in the window. A charity store had empty stores on either side, advertised as for lease. I could see there was a pawn shop across the street. Mostly I kept my head down, thinking at least there was no wind to blow in my face. I already felt like an icicle as it was.

Anyway, in the end, I was just looking out for Sam, because that’s what friends do. Since when did being wary of demons and not wanting to kill actual humans make _me_ the bad guy? And what did he mean a friend wouldn’t be judgemental? When had I ever been judgemental of Sam? Sure, I had accidentally slipped up on the whole “all demons are evil” thing, but I’d told him, at least twice before, that the demon blood thing was not his fault and that I didn’t believe it made him evil.

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have been mad at him for being sensitive about a part of himself that he hated so much. It was all very well for me to say I still loved him and that nothing could make him evil, no matter what. But I wasn’t actually living with the stuff in my veins.

I made my way past the grubby roller door of a florist, all locked up for the night. It was probably for the best it was more of a retail area than somewhere more exciting. If I’d seen a bar I probably would have walked in and ordered three straight vodkas in quick succession.

Hugging myself inside my less than adequate jacket, I thought about the situation. My dilemma was that Sam thought he needed Ruby to help him save Dean’s life. Help that I had tried but failed to provide. He was terrified his brother was going to die, and he thought that was his fault. Under those circumstances, how could I really expect him to be rational? There was no way he could judge Ruby and her motives in an objective way. She was offering something he desperately wanted.

And when I thought about that… Well, why wouldn’t he be mad at me? I hated Ruby right from the start. I told him not to trust her. I begged him to stop dealing with her, because she’d hurt me. But, just supposing, for the sake of argument, that she really _could_ save Dean. Wasn’t I kind of a bitch for asking Sam to put my feelings ahead of that? This was Dean’s _life_ we were talking about, balancing that against my hurt feelings. That’s what it came down to.

I’d told Sam off for being cautious and trying to keep Ruby onside. I was asking him to throw away the only hope he’d had in months. I still believed I was right, but getting mad at Sam wasn’t going to fix it. All he’d see was a woman who’d promised she could save Dean, and me, who’d been useless, getting all precious about having to deal with her.

I was thinking about it for maybe twenty minutes before I got so cold I had to turn around and go back. The streets were virtually deserted. There was the occasional car, but it was too cold out for even the most dedicated of 4am cat callers. On my way back to the motel, I probably walked a little faster, since I had a sense of purpose and knew where I was going, rather than wandering aimlessly.

I needed to apologise to Sam. He was wrong about Ruby. Definitely. But I had to stop treating this like an ordinary situation where some people didn’t like each other.

This was way more complicated and way more weird.

But what was the solution? Work with Ruby? Maybe I could pretend like Sam had convinced me and I’d overlooked the stitches incident because the gross potion she made me had worked. Would that be believable? Maybe if I stopped being so hostile, I could actually be in a position to stop her worming all the way into Sam’s mind. And what about Dean? He ought to be in on the plan, but I didn’t really see him agreeing that I should try and build bridges with a demon, even if it was fake. Dean had an even more black and white opinion of demons than I did.

By the time I’d made it back to the motel, I was basically a living ice sculpture, shivering my way through the carpark as dawn broke. I was pretty determined to suck it up and deal with Ruby, so I could keep an eye on her. But first I needed to say I was sorry. And I would actually mean it.

Neither of the guys had gone to sleep, but we had all had some pretty hardcore adrenaline boosts. Plus, as I discovered shortly after entering the room, they had another worry on their minds.

“For Chrissakes Ellie! Where the hell did you go, Australia?” Dean had been sitting on the bed but instantly leapt to his feet as he saw me.

“Huh?”

“You didn’t take your cell,” Sam said. “And you were gone more than two hours.”

Oh. It hadn’t seemed like that long. But I didn’t wear a watch so without my cell phone I had no way of telling the time.

“What if something happened?” Dean asked.

_What was he my father now?_

“What if we had to skip town? We haven’t exactly gone far from the scene of the crime.”

Dean sat back down again with a huff, as I stood by the door, still shivering from the cold. My bedroll and blankets were ready, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to walk past Dean to get to them.

But Sam noticed. As if I didn’t feel bad enough already, he got up and came over to me, grabbing my shoulders with each hand. He rubbed both hands up and down to warm me as I huddled inside my jacket.

He led me over to my blankets and helped me get down onto the ground. He had a quick glance over his shoulder at his brother, while I grabbed the thickest blanket and started unfolding it so I could make it into some sort of cocoon and crawl inside to wait for the soft embrace of my icy death.

“Sorry,” he said, low and quiet. “I didn’t mean…”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I shouldn’t…”

Before he could say any more, there was a heavy knocking on the door. I instinctively reached for my flick knife, and I felt Sam tense up beside me, even while wrapping the blanket round me.

Dean answered the door and without waiting on any kind of invitation, Ruby strode right past him and into the room. I tried not to let it piss me off. I was just about to apologise to Sam, now was not the time to be doing the exact opposite and antagonising her again.

“Turn on the news,” she demanded.

Probably sensing trouble, Sam left me to sort my own blankets out and with one stride of his long legs, had made it to the table where the TV remote was. He turned it on as he sat down on the end of his bed to watch. Ruby and Dean hovered near him on either side. He looked like a buffer between them.

It was one of those old TVs where it takes a bit for the picture to form entirely. We got a little sound before picture, but as the female voice started to talk, everything came into focus.

“The community is still reeling from the tragedy that happened just a few hours ago.”

What tragedy? In Monument? Was it the helicopter fire?

“Authorities believe a gas main ruptured causing the massive explosion…”

I got to my feet and though I held on to my blanket as it draped around my shoulders, I hurried to join Sam on the bed. I needed to see it, properly… to believe it.

“...that ripped apart the police station and claimed the lives of everyone inside.”

“No…” I whispered, just to myself as I sat next to Sam. “No…”

“Among the deceased, at least six police officers and staff, including sheriff Melvin Dodd, deputy Phil Amici…”

Each of their photographs came up on the screen as their names were spoken. How old was Deputy Phil? I hadn’t paid much attention at the time but now looking at his photo it seemed like he was younger than me.

“...and Secretary Nancy Fitzgerald as…”

I stared at Nancy’s picture on the screen, too stunned to really comprehend what I was hearing and seeing. As the reporter went on, I felt myself start to drift away from my own body. I was almost not there, almost slipping outside and I felt like I was one little push away from some sort of out of body experience. But I held onto myself, by reaching into my pocket and wrapping my fingers around the little piece of paper inside.

Nancy had given me her email address. She wanted to stay in touch. I was going to use it, make sure she was coping okay with everything that happened. She’d been so brave and so calm in a totally alien situation. I’d been genuinely impressed by her strength and resolve to just do what had to be done.

She was dead.

She was willing to die but we’d saved her.

And she died anyway.

They _all_ died.

I tuned back in when Sam started to talk. I was sitting beside him so I could sense all the tension in his body.

“Must have happened right after we left,” he said, his voice kind of flat.

Ruby seemed pretty happy to be right, in my opinion. “Considering the size of the blast, smart money’s on Lilith.”

As she spoke, she tossed little round things at each of us. I examined mine and saw it was something like a hex bag. It was a black piece of some kind of soft cloth, and I could feel some lumps and a few squishy parts inside it.

“What’s in these?” Dean asked, holding his up to look at it.

“Something that’ll protect you,” she said. “Throw Lilith off your trail. For the time being at least.”

“Thanks,” I said, figuring I might as well start out like I meant to go on, pretending to be okay with Ruby.

Her lips and voice were frustration but I swear on my life, in her eyes there was triumph. “Don’t thank me. Lilith killed everyone. She slaughtered your precious little virgin, plus a half dozen other people.”

She turned to Dean. “So after your big speech about humanity and war, turns out your plan was the one with the body count. Do you know how to run a battle? You strike fast and you don’t leave any survivors. So no one can go running to tell the boss. So next time… we go with my plan.”

She didn’t say anything else, just turned around and reached her hand right on out for the doorknob. I sat there next to Sam for a moment, watching his face. His eyes were extra brown, which I knew meant worried. His jaw twitched in that little way both brothers had when they were trying not to say what they were really thinking. The slump of his shoulders as he and Dean looked at each other was obvious.

Dean and I had tried to show him that we could still do things the right way, and the result was absolute disaster. I knew how he felt. I was devastated, but the deep dark brown of his eyes was so worrying that I tried to focus on what I could do about Sam’s pain rather than thinking about my own.

I felt the blanket fall off my shoulders as I got to my feet. Ruby had already slammed the door behind her, but I wrenched it open again and barely noticed the burst of cold air on my still unthawed face.

She was walking between two parked cars, all purposeful stride like she owned the place. She always looked so in control and confident of everything, and I had to admit, I kind of envied that.

I didn’t make any effort to hide my running footsteps and she turned around as I came running up behind her.

“What do you want, Strawberry Shortcake?”

“This went down exactly like you wanted it to, didn’t it?”

She didn’t really laugh. It was more one short, abrasive “Ha!”

“I definitely wanted everyone to die. Cos I’m a demon, right?”

I suddenly realised how cold it was out, but I wasn’t willing to cross my arms or shiver or do anything that would make me seem weaker.

“I don’t know where this is going, but it’s pretty obvious you want Sam listening to you and only you.”

“Because I can keep him alive, moron! But you just keep right on with your candyfloss and sunshine crap, cos that’s definitely gonna help.”

“Why are you helping?” I asked, ignoring her taunts. I didn’t even like candyfloss. Too sweet. “What’s in it for you?”

She just stood there, totally still and looked at me. Even her nose was conveying hostility. So, hoping Sam wasn’t watching out the room’s window, I grabbed her and pushed her into the little grey hatchback beside us.

I was strong, but she could certainly have broken away if she wanted to. Instead, she raised one judgemental eyebrow at me as I removed my flick-knife and flipped out the blade in a single movement.

She was taller than me, but that didn’t matter. By balancing on my toes a little, I could get right into her face.

“I don’t know what your game is, and I don’t care anymore,” I warned her. “But if you’ve been lying to Sam, if he gets hurt... I will shove a devil’s trap so far up your ass, you will taste it.”


	77. Chapter 76: Cheescake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie gets a call from a very old friend. And Dean is super psyched about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a contest to help boost followers on Tumblr, and the winner got to be inserted into the story as a character. The winner, Natasja, worked with me on what kind of role she'd play. I can't tell you how excited I was when circumstances converged so I could do something I'd been hoping to do for a while: introduce Ellie's High School bff, the mysterious Tonya.

“Dean! No! Give it back!”

It was pointless me trying to reach it, but I did anyway, determined. Dean had pulled exactly the same shit when I was little, holding things up high and grinning when I squealed for my daddy to make him stop. He didn’t grin quite so wide anymore. Now he chuckled.

“Seriously, Princess, you can jump higher than that!”

“Deeeeeeeean!”

The height difference between us now was a lot smaller, and I managed to brush my left hand across the magazine, but not long enough for me to get a grip on it.

He dodged my next jump and got up onto Sam’s bed, narrowly avoiding stepping on his brother. Sam was looking up from his book, watching us, and I could see he was trying to hide a smile.

There was no way for me to get up onto the bed without clambering all over poor Sam. Dean took the opportunity to look at the page I’d been reading.

 _“Five great sex positions he’ll be excited to try…_ You sure she’s not your girlfriend, Sammy, number three looks like your kinda…”

“DEAN!” I snapped, as I felt the heat in my cheeks. I may or may not have been contemplating which of the boys would be best at which position when Dean had snatched my magazine away. “Give. It. Back. Now!”

I had my hands on my hips, glaring up at him with the special face I used when Dad was reaching for his fifth drink. He chuckled again, but dropped the magazine into my hands before jumping down off the bed. I fixed up the crumpled pages as I perched myself on the bed beside Sam.

“I just read it cover to cover, it’s not like I need sex tips real bad.”

“Sure,” said Sam, no longer hiding his smile. “No harm in picking up some extra tips, though, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. “Just inspiration or whatever.”

Dean was still laughing as he sat down at the table and picked up his phone. I shot him another glare, as Sam leaned forward to see over my shoulder at the page.

“For the record, I would not be excited to try number four,” he said. “It looks painful.”

I slapped him in the forehead with the magazine, and he just smiled and went back to his book.

It had been a week since the fight in Colorado and we were taking it slow, though redoubling our efforts to look for Bela. The charms Ruby made us certainly weren’t drawing Lilith _to_ us, but who knew if they really hid us?

It was still a shock what had happened, and part of the reason I was buying a new magazine every day was my desperate need to keep my mind occupied. There were no hunts to be found, Bela was in the wind, and I didn’t want to think about Henriksen or Deputy Phil or the Sheriff. Or Nancy. Especially Nancy.

I’d kept the little scrap of paper where she’d written her email address for me. It was sticky-taped to a page inside my sketchbook. I didn’t know why, I just didn’t have anywhere else to keep it safe.

But me and Sam were okay. When I’d gone back inside after threatening Ruby, I was teary from grief and anger. He’d hugged me right away and held me for a little while. To be honest, I think looking after me was his way of dealing with what happened. We didn’t talk about it and neither did Dean. For a week, we’d just had this unspoken agreement between us that we wouldn’t discuss it.

Maybe Ruby told Sam what I said, maybe she didn’t. Either way, the both of us had begun to perk up a little as the week went on. We were back to being friends again and my anger and his hurt had both faded. We’d gone for a walk the previous day, nowhere in particular, just to pass some time. We watched some birds and talked about Dean’s deal, but Ruby’s name didn’t come up. We both scooted carefully around it.

And now things were starting to settle back down into that place where he could remark on my magazine and I could give him a playful bop on the head for it. We were okay.

I’d only just gotten to the end of the paragraph on Position Two when my phone rang. I quickly checked the number and got an unexpected surprise. We still emailed each other time to time, but we hadn’t spoken on the phone in a while.

I picked up the call, feeling a slight adrenaline rush. What would be so important she’d call?

“Tonya?”

Her voice sounded okay. She didn’t exactly sound peppy, but it was just her usual voice, quite deep for a woman, but soft and friendly and almost as good a singer as I was a bad one. She had a pretty thick southern accent, cos she grew up in Louisiana before her parents split up and she and her mom moved to Sioux Falls. She’d been my best friend, mentor and hero through High School and beyond.

“Hi, El! How you doin’, hun?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, since the truth was not an option. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, then paused. “Sorta… I mean, I’m fine, mom’s fine, we’re all fine. But there’s this… I’m gonna tell you something, and just bear with me even if it sounds totally crazy, okay?”

I had once borne with Tonya as she explained why going out with Troy Barrett was not a good idea, and thought she’d been completely nuts then. The guy was swim team vice-captain and he had a real nice car and looked kinda like Matt Damon. So I ignored her.

And that’s how I learned the very important lesson that Tonya was always right.

“Okay, go for it.”

I could hear her take a deep breath on the other end of the line and wondered what on earth was making her nervous. Tonya didn’t do nervous. From the first day I met her, she had been my confident, clear-thinking, ambitious friend, always looking out for me and never hesitating on anything.

“So, I have this friend, uh… a client of hers had this… well he set up this camera and uh… Okay so, your Dad has a lot of those old books with the weird titles and all those symbols in your house. You used to say they were a religious thing?”

It had begun to dawn on me where this was going, but I let her tell it her way. “Uh huh, why?”

“Well we saw something and we looked on the internet and… El, you know I ain’t a superstitious person but there’s something in that house. Something…”

She stopped abruptly and let out a huge sigh.

“Screw it. Does your Dad know something about ghosts?”

* * *

Back in the car I could see Dean grinning even though I sat behind him.

“I can’t believe we get to meet Tonya,” he said, nudging Sam. “This is a great day, Sammy. Sexy Doctor Tonya.”

I tried to interrupt, but in vain. “That’s not…”

“Cemetery Tonya?” Dean said, more like he was asking God himself than me, all his prayers having finally been answered.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. He was keeping it low key, but I was pretty sure he was keen to meet the lead character in so many of my stories.

Dean took his eyes off the road for a moment, to look back at me, still grinning with anticipation, possibly because he wanted to meet Tonya for her own sake. But also possibly because she would surely be an exciting new source of things to tease me about. No such luck, Dean. Tonya would _never_ betray me.

“Condom carrot Tonya,” he went on. “ _Strawberry Cheesecake Tonya_!”

I just smiled.

“Yep!” That cheesecake story was truly the greatest thing to ever happen to me. Or to anyone. I had expected Dean to be more excited about the carrot thing, but, like any sensible person, he longed to meet the real woman behind the legend of the cheesecake.

“I kind of expect her to be nine foot tall with a flaming sword,” said Sam. “Or some sort of independent light source that just keeps her illuminated at all times, like an Arthurian knight.”

“Or an Amazon,” Dean added. “Like Wonder Woman.”

Wonder Woman was not an entirely inaccurate description of Tonya, or at least the version of her that came out in my stories. Tonya was only one year older than me, but to shy, awkward, desperately lonely fifteen-year-old Ellie, she was… well she was Wonder Woman.

“Tell us about the case,” Sam said. “What did she say?”

I led my thoughts away from reminiscences and focused on the job. As we turned onto the highway, I told the boys the story Tonya had told me.

She had finally become a licensed paediatrician. She worked at a large hospital, but her boss had noticed her manner with the children really helped relax them and they trusted her. So he’d assigned her to deal with kids who were possible victims of child abuse. I already knew about that, from our semi-regular emailing. I was so proud of her, but at the same time, not remotely surprised, because isn’t that exactly what she’d done with me? Even though she was only sixteen herself, she had taken me on when I needed someone and taught me how to love myself. It seemed totally natural to me that she would put abused and traumatised kids at ease.

Anyhow, it was the abuse cases that led to Tonya meeting this friend, Tas. Tas was a lawyer who represented the state in child abuse cases, and she and Tonya had really hit it off. One day over lunch, Tas tells this weird story. She’d have kids coming in all the time, with their foster parents or a relative acting as guardian or whoever. But most of them were kids who’d been removed from the violent or neglectful environment. Yet they were still coming in with bumps and bruises and sometimes even a broken arm. The adults couldn’t explain it. The kids all said stuff about a monster. He lived in the closet or under the bed and he attacked them. And apart from the actual physical injury, that monster fear was pretty normal. But they all gave the monster the same name. He was called “Pobo”.

So Tas and Tonya both looked into this Pobo character, thinking maybe he was some scary story kids told each other, like Bloody Mary or something. But they never found any other kids talking about him. Just the kids Tas worked with. And apart from when they were siblings, as far as she knew, none of them ever met any of the others.

So far so weird, right?

Then a foster dad comes in to see Tas. The little girl had been crying about Pobo and swearing that he lived under the bed and he was going to kill her. Foster mom stays in the room with her a few nights, Pobo’s a no show, kid is reassured. Then as soon as the grown-up goes back to her own bed, Pobo apparently shows up.

These foster parents did what sounds to me like the sensible thing. They got a baby monitor and told the girl she could call for them right away if Pobo came and they would come and chase him away. First few hours, everything’s normal, child sleeps peacefully. Then the guy wakes up suddenly, just senses something might be wrong, so he listens to the monitor. And he hears breathing. Not the kid. An adult man breathing, deep and rumbling. He calls to the kid through the monitor and then the whole thing fritzes out. Blue sparks arcing off the speaker and everything. He yells for his wife, runs for the kid’s room. She’s sitting up in bed sobbing. Monitor’s busted.

Freaked out, the guy installs a security camera, shows the little girl where it is, tells her if Pobo comes, it will help them catch him. At this point the couple are horrified, thinking the kid’s father has found a way into their house or something. The little girl sleeps in their room with them for the night. And in the morning, they all watch the tape.

Tas knows Tonya has been interested in the whole Pobo thing, so once the father has shown her the tape, she calls Tonya to come take a look too. And this is the point Tonya found it hard to even talk to me. I’d been able to hear the shudder in her voice when she spoke. She couldn’t even describe the tape to me. She just said it was a ghost. There’s a ghost on the tape.

Then she remembered me, and the sigils in my house because “Dad’s kinda superstitious”. And she’d sometimes looked at the bookshelves and seen the titles mentioned witches and spells and demons. She’d always just assumed my father was a really weird guy, but that was none of her business. But with her newfound certainty that she’d seen a ghost on film, everything suddenly looked a lot different. Because if ghosts were now real, why not witches? Or demons? And if they were real, maybe Ellie’s weird Dad wasn’t weird at all.

* * *

We hit town in the early afternoon, so we decided to head straight to the hospital. Since we were there to see a friend, we didn’t need to suit up all FBI style. And that was okay by me, cos even in my sketch artist outfit, my hair was still a nightmare to control.

The paediatric ward was actually pretty cool. There was a big mural, all bright colours and butterflies made out of kids’ handprints. I peeked in a room and saw that it was pretty bright in there too. I’d only been to hospital one time when I was little, and I’d screamed myself hoarse because of the Christmas decorations in the ER. I’d never actually been admitted, so it was my first time visiting a children’s ward.

The boys milled in an awkward sort of way while I went up to the nurse behind the desk and told her I was a friend of Doctor Washington and she was expecting us. She said we could sit and wait while she paged Tonya.

There was a woman pushing a little boy ahead of her in a wheelchair. He was bald and he had those little breathing tubes attached to his nose, running to the oxygen tank on his chair.

I watched them head down towards the rooms and sighed.

“Poor little kids. It always sucks being in hospital, but at least adults can fully understand why everything’s happening.”

Sam nodded as he leaned back in the grey plastic chair. “Yeah. For a young kid it’d just seem like people were sticking you with needles and putting you in machines all day.”

“And mom and dad trying to convince you all that pain is to help you,” added Dean.

I nodded too, but before I could even sit all the way back in the ergonomically questionable chair, a familiar person appeared, in a fancy white coat that looked _so_ stylish on her. Of course. Everything did.

She obviously hadn’t been paged yet, because she opened her mouth wide in joy and surprise.

“Ellie Bean!”

Totally ignoring Dean’s snort, I leapt up out of my chair without thinking and rushed over to hug her. Just as my guys had predicted, she was quite tall. Taller than me, anyway and maybe half a head shorter than Dean.

She gripped me in a tight hug that lasted several seconds. As she was letting me go, she spoke low into my ear. “Damn, hun, you didn’t have to bring me candy.”

I was confused for a moment, until she turned me around and gestured towards the boys. My immediate thought was “Tonya, no!” But then I considered it and almost laughed. She’d probably check Sam out, but he wasn’t really her type. Too… not shy, but… modest, maybe? Tonya liked to pick up guys who thought they were God’s gift to women.

I made myself laugh just thinking about it. Dean Winchester saw himself as a ladies man. But he could not handle Tonya. He thought he was a love-them leave-them type, but one evening with her and he’d be begging to get married.

Grabbing her hand, I pulled her over to meet the candy.

“Sam, Dean, this is Tonya. Tonya… these are my boys.”

Dean normally objected to being referred to as one of my boys, always objecting he was older than me. But he jumped up and began to shake Tonya’s hand with enthusiasm.

“Dean. Dean Winchester. It’s an absolute privilege to meet you.”

She smiled and looked at me as Dean finally let go of her hand.

“You told him the cheesecake story, didn’t ya?”

I shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t think he’d ever actually meet you.”

“Are you kidding?” she asked, a smile spreading across her face as she turned towards Sam. “That story makes me sound awesome. You must be Sam.”

He had gotten to his feet and now he shook her hand too, warmly, but not with quite the same level of admiration as Dean. He had enjoyed the cheesecake story as much as anyone, though.

Tonya seemed to be giving Sam a little more scrutiny than Dean, looking carefully at his face until she let go of his hand. Then she smiled at him, and he returned it, of course, because she had that effect on people.

“I gotta work til four,” she said. “But listen, there’s a coffee shop end of my street, why don’t y’all wait for me? Tas is gonna meet us at mine.”

I looked at the guys, who seemed to be waiting on me, since this was technically my case.

“Why don’t we go find a motel,” I began. “We can…”

“A motel?!” Tonya exclaimed, in her southern drawl. “Nuh uh, honey, y’all are staying at my place.”

Tonya had moved to Sioux Falls at thirteen and she’d had southern hospitality fed straight into her soul from birth. It was pointless to tell her no, but maybe Sam and Dean could.

“Thanks,” I said, “But the guys might…”

“Are you kidding?” asked Dean. “You think we wanna go to a motel when Cheesecake Tonya’s got room for us _and_ juicy stories about teen Ellie?”

Flashing her gorgeous straight white teeth again, Tonya winked at him. “Oh, I got the goods, darlin’ but it don’t come free. You want the stories, you gotta work for ‘em.”

Sam was trying to hide a smile, while Dean looked somewhere between confused and excited. He was probably trying to figure out whether the work Tonya demanded would be sexual in any way. It wouldn’t be.

“Meet me at the coffee shop,” she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and ran it down my arm just like she always did when we were kids. As she did, she smiled. “We can have a sleepover, like we used to.”

“So we’re sneaking out to a party tonight?” Sam asked, making Tonya laugh loud.

“Oh sweetie, we’ll make our own party,” she said, flashing another wink to Dean before she turned and headed back down the long corridor, her heels clacking and her white coat swishing as she walked.

* * *

She’d given me her address on the phone that morning, so it was easy enough to find her apartment block. We parked on the kerb and walked back to the coffee shop. We hadn’t really eaten a proper lunchtime meal and we had a little while to wait, so we ordered some coffee each and generously sized meals. There were fresh deli sandwiches for Sam, fries for me and pie for Dean. What a perfect place to sit and wait!

Conversation drifted here and there. We discussed the food, the decor, how nice the neighbourhood was, what secrets Tonya knew about me and whether she’d reveal them. That last one came up a lot.

“She’s not gonna tell you,” I told Dean for the nine thousandth time. “Sisters before misters, dude.”

“What do you think is in Ellie Bean’s dark past anyway?” Sam asked, preferring to tease me in his own, slightly more subtle way. “You knew her with pigtails. And Tonya never got to live the Summer of Sundresses. What could be better than that?”

“He’s tragically right,” I said, with a sigh. “You guys knew me in my most interesting years. Everything about me in High School was spectacularly average.”

“I doubt that,” said Sam as my phone beeped with the message tone.

It was Tonya. Tas had shown up a little early so they were already at the apartment and we should come meet them. We gathered up our coats and headed out.

The walk was maybe five or six minutes, plus the stairs up to the second floor. Dean and I got into a shoving match on the way, so it was Sam who knocked, while the two of us pushed and slapped each other all the way along the corridor.

I gave Dean an extra hard slap and then ran ahead of him because no take-backsies is a legit rule and he was a dirty cheat. Sam was halfway in the door when I got there, which was for the best really, as I probably couldn’t have stopped running without his bulk to catch me.

“Whoop! Sorry!” I squeaked, as he steadied me.

He just ushered me ahead of him into the apartment. It wasn’t Tonya that had opened the door, so it must have been her lawyer friend, Tas. She had longish dark hair that I envied immediately, because it was straight and silky-looking instead of an unruly cascade of frizz. It was her eyes I really noticed, though. They were so pretty, big and wide, like Audrey Hepburn and those other black and white movie stars.

She’d obviously come from work, because she was in a pretty professional looking get-up, nice conservative skirt and blouse. Her jacket was kind of funky for a lawyer, but since she worked with kids, maybe she needed a look that made her more relatable. That would make sense.

“Tas?” I asked. I could hear Dean arriving behind me, finally, but decided now was not the appropriate time to point out what a snail-paced loser he was. “I’m Ellie. I went to school with Tonya.”

She shook my hand with a friendly, maybe slightly shy, smile. “Natasja,” she said. “But Tas is fine.” She had an accent, probably from somewhere in Europe, but it wasn’t French or British or any kind of accent I recognised.

Next she was shaking Sam’s hand.

“Is that Dutch?” he asked her.

“Right,” she smiled. “I was born in Alkmaar.”

Sam nodded, because of course he’s heard of random Dutch towns. “Where they have the cheese thing, right?”

No way! Sam had never been to Europe. How many college extracurriculars could one man take?! It annoyed me how knowledgeable he was and how easily he recalled that knowledge.

Well, mostly it annoyed me. A little part of me was kinda turned on by how smart he was, and the rest of me was annoyed with that part too. It was a traitor.

Tas seemed very surprised, but pleased. I didn’t see or hear the rest of what went on, because Tonya was coming in from the kitchen. It was a small apartment, but definitely big enough for one. It was nice too, pretty plain decorating, with white walls and grey carpet, but that meant Tonya’s own pictures and furniture and stuff stood out more. She was always good at decorating and colour matching and stuff. I basically couldn’t be trusted to pick an outfit without her help, because she always knew what looked good together.

She had another hug for me, and I just felt so much warmth and love in it that I realised how much I had really missed her. Emailing each other just wasn’t the same.

“This place is real nice,” I said. “You’re so good at decorating!”

There was her smile again, as she kept hold of my hand and pulled me with her towards the couch. I noticed a picture of the two of us on a shelf near the TV. It made me feel so grateful that our friendship meant so much to her. It was everything to me when we were kids, but I always sort of assumed I was the dead weight and she towed me along out of kindness.

“Come sit down,” Tas was saying to the boys. “Uh… Tonya’s got the video.”

“I had Mr Gregg burn it to a DVD for us,” Tonya said, sitting down and patting the space beside her for me to sit too.

As Dean sat on her other side, she leaned forward to get the remote. Sam perched himself on the arm of the couch, beside me. There was room for Tas on Dean’s left, but she lingered back a little, leaning against the wall.

As Tonya turned on the TV, Sam got himself comfortable and I shifted my own weight a little, trying to avoid using his butt as a cushion. Then after a few more buttons were pushed, we were looking at footage of a child’s bedroom.

It was a bit bare, probably because the kids was fostered short term. There was a bed and some big butterflies decorating the walls, and a few toys and books on a little shelf. The curtains over the window seemed to have some kind of pattern on. There weren’t any kind of drawers or closet, but maybe that’s where the camera was placed.

The bed was empty, and I remembered that the foster parents, this Mr and Mrs Gregg, had put the girl in their own bedroom for the night, out of fear her father really was finding some way into their house. Without her there, it was a completely static image, even though I could see from the DVD player that it wasn’t paused.

“2:35am,” Dean read from the timestamp in the corner of the screen, just as it moved on to 2:36. “This where it starts?”

“The rest of the tape was just empty room,” Tas said. “Mr Gregg and I both watched it very closely but there’s nothing there.”

Her word was good enough for me, and Dean must have thought so too, because he looked away from her and back at the TV.

“So what…” Sam began, and Tonya held up a hand.

“Wait,” was all she said.

Not long after the timestamp moved on to 2:37, I saw it. There was a patch of darkness in the middle of the room that had not been there before. I pointed to it, instinctively, but I didn’t need to. Dean was leaning forward, intrigued, and I could feel Sam straighten up a little.

Slowly, what looked like a slight discolouration in the film grew darker and darker, as well as bigger. The blurry edges spread out over several minutes. We all watched in rapt silence for five minutes, until the darkness began to take shape.

“Huh,” said Sam, leaning so far forward he was no longer sitting on the arm at all.

It was a person. The dark shape had materialised slowly into a human figure. Judging it compared to the bed and window, I thought it was about six foot or so tall. There was no way to distinguish any sort of gender.

“It’s a ghost, right?” Tas asked.

I looked back at her, wanting to nod but… I wasn’t sure.

“Ghosts tend to be white or silver apparitions,” Sam said, as he moved closer to the TV. “Or blue sometimes.”

“Or they go full on solid,” Dean added. “This is… “

“Weird,” I finished for him.

Just as I spoke, the figure began to move. It didn’t float or hover, but walked. The legs distinctly moved, as whatever it was took decent sized strides towards the bed. It took three or four steps and leant forward to look, still without becoming anything more than a moving three dimensional shadow.

It stopped. It looked up. It looked back at the bed.

It stood straight and tall at its full height. And then it looked directly into the lens of the camera. Slowly, slowly, it raised one dark hand, up and forward. At first I thought it was going to point. Even though it was just a darker shape in a dark room, I could still feel its eyes staring into me through the lens. A shudder went through me as I felt it look and somehow, even though it stood still and almost passive, raising that one hand, I knew it was angry.

The hand reached out towards the camera, slowly and deliberately.

Then the screen flashed bright blue, and there was nothing but static.

We stared at the screen as Tonya turned it off.

“Well… that’s just unsettling,” said Dean.

Hell of an understatement.

I’m a Hunter. I deal with ghosts and monsters and poltergeists and apparitions and that one time a gross vampire stalker. And I gotta tell ya.

It was creepy as fuck.


	78. Chapter 77: Annie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: After an old-fashioned sleepover, Ellie and the boys meet one of Natasja's little clients.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for child abuse and a brief mention of domestic violence and murder. (If there is absolutely ANYTHING at all you need to be trigger-warned for, leave a comment, or let me know anonymously on my Tumblr, @winchestersplusone My own triggers are very unique and specific, so I promise there's nothing you could ask for that would seem weird to me, I'll warn for anything you need, no questions asked.)

Tonya had a little spare bedroom with a pullout sofa. After Tas had gone home, Sam won _Rock, Paper, Scissors_. So Dean pretended like he wanted to sleep on the couch in the living room anyway. Tonya and I used to share a bed all the time when we had sleepovers, and she was totally cool with doing again.

Dean only got one wise-ass remark in before Sam elbowed him sharply in the chest. I had never been so grateful. I was pretty confident that Tonya knew the truth about me, but she’d never said anything about it, and always been comfortable to share a bed. But I was already slightly on edge, and I didn’t need Dean implying there was something amusing about two women sleeping in the same bed. Sam still said his brother wouldn’t really care what I was, but I  wasn’t so sure. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything, but I’d worked so hard to get Dean to respect me and what if I lost that?

I was ready for bed first, so I sat and waited, just like I used to. I was cross legged in the middle of her double bed, squishing a pillow to my chest. I knew what was coming and where I needed to be.

Tonya eventually came out of the bathroom with her pyjamas on and I could sorta smell her minty toothpaste even from half a room away. She was carrying a glass of water and she went to the table beside the bed. She got a little pill jar out of the drawer and swallowed one real quick before drinking the rest of the water.

She put the glass down, she went back across the room and peered around the corner, where I assumed she saw Dean, already passed out on the couch. She shut the door, real careful so it didn’t bang. Then she came back over to the bed, and took a big hairtie off the side table, quickly bundling up her silky black hair into a bun on top of her head.

Sitting down on the bed, she pulled her legs underneath her as she turned around, until finally she was ready, sitting cross legged opposite me.

“So…” she said. “You hunt monsters now…”

I laughed, covering my mouth in surprise at how loud I was. Dean probably wouldn’t hear me, but Sam was on the other side of the wall and I didn’t want to wake him.

“Yeah,” I said. “I… Um… I didn’t entirely _not_ hunt them before…”

She gasped. “What, like… at school? I mean when you were at school, not that the monsters were at school. Oh my God, El, were there monsters at school? Are you Buffy?”

I’d started giggling at the absurdity of the situation and her incredibly earnest face, long before she’d finished talking.

“No!” I assured her. “There was never anything at school. But Dad sometimes let me go with him. I think he was trying to scare me with how dangerous it is.”

She smiled. “Has he… like… _met_ you?”

“Yeah, it didn’t work.”

“So, does your Dad still do this stuff, or have you taken over the business or something?”

I wondered how I ought to phrase it. Technically Dad had begged Sam and Dean to be my babysitters, but I didn’t want to put it that way, and make it sound like I needed their help.

“Well, he and I had a… I guess you’d call it a disagreement. I got hurt, a while back. Remember when I told you I got in a fight, cracked my skull?” She nodded. I’d told her that in an email and she’d immediately called me when she read it. “So, I _was_ in a fight. Sorta. I got thrown against a wall by a demon before the fight even started. Anyway, I was hurt bad and after that Dad tried to stop me hunting anymore. He was scared I’d get hurt worse.”

“Oh…” she said. “I guess that must have been scary for him, but seriously? He must have known he can’t stop you doing what you want. I mean, that’s your whole vibe… not being stopped.”

“Yeah, it ended in screaming,” I said. “So, I guess we sorta… compromised. I was gonna go either way, so I made a deal to ride with Sam and Dean. This gig is safer with backup. So, I said I’d hang with them and Dad went for it.”

“So… did they already know the deal or did you bring them into it?” asked Tonya.

“Oh, no way, they were raised in this stuff. Their dad used to hunt with mine sometimes. Or we looked after them while he was on something dangerous.”

She gasped. “Oh!!! Dean! That Dean guy you were so cut up about when I met you.”

Of course. I remembered meeting Tonya with vivid technicolour, but it had been years, so the timeline of the thing wasn’t foremost in my mind. When Tonya first befriended me, it was the summer after Dad and John had that massive bust up. I was devastated about not seeing Sam ever again, but I’d also been super upset over Dean and the love that would never be. That was Tonya’s area of expertise, so it was no surprise that was the part she remembered best.

“Yeah,” I said. “I had such a thing for him when I was a kid.”

“And now you don’t?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Oh, I’d go there,” I said. “It’s freakin’ hard work not jumping him. Or his brother… I just… you’ve seen the two of them, damn what was I thinking, every second thought I have is dirty!”

She laughed. “It’s pretty obscene how hot they are. And you just hang with them everyday. I don’t know whether I pity you or hate you!”

“Pity me…” I begged. “Dean’s a disgusting flirt who walks around shirtless to taunt me. And Sam’s such a sweetie, every sex dream makes me wake up feeling like a criminal. He probably doesn’t know his body can contort the way it does in my head…”

Tonya laughed so hard, I was sure Sam would hear from the next room. Hopefully he wouldn’t know what she was laughing _about_.

“Seriously, though…” she said. “There’s ghosts and you said something about demons…”

Nodding, I tried to look casual about it. “Yep. Demons are a thing. Hell exists.”

“Isn’t that terrifying?” she asked. “Getting into fights with demons?”

“Not really,” I said, with a shrug. “I’ve known they exist most of my life. They’re stronger than a human, but I know I can hold my own. It’s not fear so much as… I dunno… wariness? Like you’re aware of what they can do, so you’re careful about them, but I’ve rarely been actually afraid.”

She looked at me with something that was startlingly close to awe. “So… what about other stuff… your dad had those witch books, but what about… I dunno, vampires?”

“Real,” I said. ‘And not afraid of stakes, garlic or holy water.”

“Then how…” She trailed off, apparently unable to say the words “kill them”.

I didn’t know how to word it in a way that didn’t sound dramatic and scary to a civilian. “Cut off the head,” I said.

Her hand went instinctively to her heart and I hoped I wasn’t freaking her out too much. Maybe I should have stuck to conversation about how hot the boys were.

“It’s not as dangerous as it sounds,” I lied. “All three of us grew up learning this shit like math and geography.”

Her nod was sort of weak and faint, and I wasn’t sure she believed me. It _was_ dangerous, but not nearly as potentially fatal for me and the Winchesters as it would be for Tonya or anyone else who didn’t know what they were doing.

So I told her the fun stories. I left out the vampire stalker (still at large, by the way) and I skirted right around the whole Hell Gate issue. And Sam’s death. That business would probably freak most hunters out, let alone civilians.

But I told her the easy ones and the interesting ones. The comatose girl with the fairy tale projection. That creepy couple who tried to eat the boys for Christmas dinner. The totally awesome ghost ship.

We stayed up later than we should have, but Tonya had so many questions. It was weird, because for almost half my life I had looked up to Tonya. I always used to wish I was her, with her perfect skin and amazing figure, but more than that. I’d always wanted her confidence and her attitude. Plus also her smarts.

But now she was looking at me with the wide eyes of wonder. She was impressed. She was proud. For the first time, it felt like _she_ admired _me_. It felt real nice, but still very strange, like the world was back-to-front and upside down.

At some point we decided to get into bed and lie down, but keep talking. That plan didn’t last long. I lay facing Tonya, gripping onto the corner of my pillow, which apparently is a thing I always do. I was telling her about that time I’d strangled a belligerent poltergeist…

* * *

And then I woke up.

I’d done my usual night-time shower and Sam had done the same, to ease the rush in the morning. Tonya had to go to work, but Natasja was going to meet us at the house where the ghost or spirit or whatever that creepy-ass thing was, had been filmed. We were almost ready as Tonya grabbed her coat to leave.

She grabbed my arm as she passed me towards the door. She gave a little jerk of the head in Dean’s direction. He was tucking his suit shirt into his pants, and the weird thing is, despite Dean’s incredible physique, he actually looked even better with his suit shirt hanging a little loose. Maybe it was because it allowed some room for the imagination.

“Sure you’re over that, babe?” she whispered.

I smiled. “The guy, yes. _That_? Not ever.”

Tonya had a huge laugh and she threw her head back then and let it out, low and sort of breathy, like her voice.

“I taught you well!” she said with a wink, as she pulled open the door.

Seriously though, I was no longer remotely interested in Dean as a romantic prospect. But the sight of him semi-undressed was not something I would ever get tired of.

“What?” Dean asked, looking up as the door slammed behind Tonya. “She taught you what?”

“Nothing,” I told him, look him up and down carefully as I took another bite of my toast.

It occurred to me that if there was ever a time to step up my game in our aggressive sexiness contest, this was definitely it. Tonya would kill a man for the chance to be involved.

* * *

We didn’t want to get to the Gregg house before Tas was there to introduce us to the family. So we went down to the diner at the end of Tonya’s street. She wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, so she only had instant. Fun fact about hunters: we tend to be quite finicky about our coffee. When you’ve been up all night digging up corpses or staking out at a potential victim’s place, coffee is essential. And while instant worked fine for the wake-up kick, most diners served the proper, brewed stuff and you notice the difference in taste after a while. Plus also, when you rarely eat two meals in the same place and standards are different everywhere, coffee is the only thing you _can_ be picky about. You can have it super hot without milk but one sugar, or insist on letting it sit for a while before you add your milk so you can drink it quicker, but no sugar because _“why would you add sugar it’s meant to be bitter, Ellie, do you order maple syrup and put salt in it?”_

After breakfast we headed to the house. Natasja had said we should be there at 9:30 and we were right on time. The boys had gone for suits, while I’d done my skirt and collared shirt sketch-artist outfit. Since the family were already convinced it was a ghost, we didn’t need the FBI pretext, but these people were country club types and they’d been told we were professionals, so we figured the denim and plaid look was probably not the right one.

Sam knocked and the door was answered by a tall blonde lady. She had a perfect manicure and a neat little bob hairstyle but kinda layered. I noticed it particularly because a couple of stray hairs gave me the impression she had thick, difficult hair like me. The same look probably wouldn’t work with my fat round face, though.

“Good morning, ma’am.” Sam held out his hand and she shook it. “I’m Sam Winchester, Natasja asked us to meet her here.”

She gave a sort of smile that seemed to be more like recognition or relief than happiness. “I’m Alison Gregg. You’re the… “ She hesitated just for a moment, and I definitely saw her eyes flick to the side, like she was looking at the neighbouring yard. “… the experts?”

“That’s right,” Sam said. He gestured to us in turn. “My brother, Dean. Our associate, Ellie Singer.”

We both shook Mrs Gregg’s hand and she ushered us into the hall. The house had a sort of foyer area, which to me, is the ultimate in luxury and opulence. Everyone I’d ever known, growing up, had a front door that opened into a useful room that served a purpose. Straight onto a living room, or maybe there was a shared entry and staircase area like in my house. I didn’t see the point of a room just to have a front door. It was wasted space.

They had expensive looking art on the walls, so maybe that was the point of a foyer. It sure was white and clean. There was an archway into the living room, and she motioned for us to go ahead and then followed behind.

Tas stood up as we came in. She’d been sitting on one of two white and grey couches. The carpet was a very pale grey too. These people might have been very nice, but their decor seemed pretty incompatible with fostering small kids.

The kid was the first thing I really focused on. That’s just how I roll, okay. Boring suburban couple, sure I’ll say hello and how are you but then show me to the children and pets, already. They’re where the action is.

Tonya had said she was five, but she looked small for her age. She was sitting on the couch beside Mr Gregg, who was in his casual attire of as-new jeans and a white polo shirt. When I looked at him to shake his hand, it occurred to me that this couple was actually rather younger than I’d expected. I’d been thinking of an older couple, maybe forties, but I had no reason to make that assumption. He was only early thirties by my guess and his wife maybe a few years older.

Once I’d done the hand shaking thing, I focused in on the girl again. Her arm was in a sling, and I wondered if that was the work of her father or the mysterious Pobo. She also had a lot of freckles and red hair. The freckles made me feel attached to her immediately. Most of my freckles had faded and the ones that remained I was sort of proud of, but it had taken a long time for me to feel that way. Poor little thing was small for her age and a redhead too. Plus she was a foster kid, so I felt so worried for her. Kids can be so awful and she had a whole host of traits that tend to get singled out by bullies.

Mr Gregg hadn’t stood up when we came in because the little girl was clutching onto his arm with her good one. She was clinging close and sort of using his arm as a bit of a shield. But she was watching everything, her big green eyes moving from person to person as she listened to all the polite pleasantries and introductions.

Finally, she herself became the subject.

“This is Annie,” said Mrs Gregg. “Annie, these people are friends of Doctor Washington. Do you want to say hello?”

She shook her head and hid behind the arm of her foster father.

“So, I’ll be honest with you,” said Mr Gregg. Matthew was his first name. “I never believed in ghosts and goblins and all that business. But I know what I saw on that tape.”

“We’re not religious or anything,” Alison went on. “My sister said we ought to get a priest or something, but Doctor Washington said she might know someone else. And we thought, well, isn’t a ghost hunter just as likely to work as a priest?”

“Some priests and pastors genuinely can perform an exorcism,” Sam said, completely matter-of-factly like that’s a totally normal thing to say. “But I’m not sure this is there kind of haunting.” Smart move. This couple were accepting the proof of their own eyes, but they weren’t ready to know about demons.

“About Annie’s arm,” I asked. “Was that Pobo?”

Mr Gregg nodded and pulled the little girl closer. “Yeah. Honestly, we thought it was just nightmares until this. How could she just break her arm while asleep in bed? Doctor Washington said it’s a spiral fracture, like someone wrenched on it and pulled.”

Hunting’s a gig where you talk to a lot of people about mysterious goings on and sometimes they’re not actually mysterious at all. I’d gotten very good at knowing when a witness had genuinely encountered something supernatural and when it was horseshit and some other explanation was at work. Sure, maybe there was a slight possibility they’d faked that tape, and one of the Greggs had twisted the girl’s arm and hurt her. But I didn’t think so. For one thing, the way that kid clung onto Matthew’s arm surely ruled him out as her attacker and probably as an accomplice as well. Kids have great instincts. They know who they can trust, and this girl trusted Mr Gregg and possibly nobody else.

Sam knelt down to get on Annie’s level, but she clearly didn’t feel comfortable about that. She shrank a little. Kids usually responded well to both the boys, but Sam’s size was intimidating enough to a grown adult, let alone an abused little girl.

“Annie, we’re monster hunters. Can you tell us anything about the monster who hurt you?”

She shook her head very quickly, her little red curls bouncing as she shrank further behind Matthew. He looked down at her.

“It’s okay, sweetie. They’re not going to hurt you, I promise.”

She only shook her head again.

Natasja had sat down on the second couch, with Dean next to her. When Sam looked at her as he stood, she shook her head too, in an apologetic sort of way.

“Annie has been with Matthew and Alison for nearly six months. She’s been experiencing a lot of separation anxiety, even before Pobo showed up.”

“And you’re foster carers?” asked Dean, and I could see his eyes flicker around the room.

Alison smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. What kind of foster home has white carpets?” I hadn’t liked the look of her at first but the way she said that and broke the ice a little kinda made me like her.

“Annie’s my niece,” Matthew said. “She… My sister was killed and I… obviously there was no question about taking in Annie.” He squeezed her close again. “You’re our precious girl, aren’t you, pumpkin-head?”

She manage to give one little nod and then popped back behind her uncle’s arm again, almost like she was surprised at herself for being so bold. Poor little mite was the shyest kid I’d ever seen, and I’d met a lot of twitchy poltergeist victims.

“So Annie’s dad…” Dean began.

Alison nodded right away. “They haven’t caught him,” she said. “That’s why this whole thing worried us so much. He was… He _is_ vicious. Jenny was absolutely petrified of him.”

Matthew nodded agreement, his face quite red. I recognised it. My father never cried, and his face flushed the same way instead.

“Well, we’ve seen what you’ve seen, and it seems like Annie’s father isn’t our suspect,” I said, changing the subject the way I would for Dad.

“Exactly,” Dean said, getting to his feet. He put a hand into his pocket, where the EMF meter was. “Mrs Gregg, why don’t you show me Annie’s bedroom. Sam, you want to take a look at the camera?”

Sam nodded. “And the busted baby monitor, if you got it.”

Alison took both of the boys out. Dean had subtly removed himself and his brother from the room, leaving little Annie with just two women and the man she trusted.

“That’s better, isn’t it Annie?” asked Natasja, leaning forward. “I hate when there’s too many people in a room.”

Apparently she did feel a little safer, because Annie nodded at her. Natasja was her lawyer or something, as far as I understood it. I didn’t know exactly what she did if the father wasn’t in custody or whatever, but Annie obviously knew her well enough that she came out of her shell just a little.

“So, about the other kids?” I asked Tas, figuring if I just talked like normal, Annie might get used to my presence in the room enough that I could actually talk to her myself. “Their injuries, the ones they say Pobo gave them? Are they similar, spiral fractures?”

Picking up on my vibe, Tas stopped looking at Annie and responded normally as I sat down on the couch where Dean had been.

“Creepy similar. Of the kids on my books, six have spiral fractures to the right forearm. I have another eight with broken fingers, all of them both the middle and index fingers on the right hand.” Apparently this was news to Matthew, as he looked horrified. “Four with a cracked rib.”

“Same rib?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.

“Yes. And last night… one of my girls was admitted with a head wound.”

“Oh God,” said Matthew. “Did she…”

Poor Tas sniffed and blinked a few times. “Coma,” she said.

I tried to stay professional, but it was a pretty horrific situation. “So, that’s how many kids?”

“There’s some overlap,” she said. “A few of them have been hurt more than once, so it’s only thirteen total.”

“What’s the age-range?” I asked.

“Annie is actually the youngest. The eldest is eight.”

I asked if they were the only kids of that age she dealt with and she nodded that they were. So every kid she represented aged between five and eight had been attacked and injured by Pobo. The same injures, repeating over and over, that sure sounded like a vengeful spirit. But in thirteen different houses? How did that work?

There was a period of silence while we all sat there and thought about this. I took a brief look at Annie and saw she was still hiding, but she was wide-eyed and attentive. She was listening to us.

“So, do you think it _is_ a ghost?” asked Matthew.

“Um… Well what that tape showed isn’t something I’ve seen before, but that doesn’t mean anything. We usually say “spirit” rather than ghost, because ghost kind of has a more specific image to it.”

Tas and Matthew were both nodding. A ghost kind of conjures up the image of the white sheet with eyes, or maybe a sad lonely transparent thing that looks exactly like the deceased.

“A spirit can take so many different forms, you know? But the way it fritzed out your monitor and your camera, that’s very familiar. Electrical surges happen a lot with vengeful spirits.”

“Vengeful?” asked Tas. “Why… why would someone want revenge on all these little kids?”

I shrugged. “It isn’t logical. When someone dies, especially if it’s violent, and they hang onto a lot of resentment, they refuse to go. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife or whatever, but wherever we go when we die, some people don’t catch that train. And the mind starts to decay, just like the body. I always think of it as the spirit of the person starts to go crazy. They lose sight of their original resentment and it manifests in attacks that seem random, but do end up making a sort of sense, once you figure out the backstory and who the spirit is.”

Both the adults and the little girl were listening to me with great interest.

“It’s interesting you say electrical surges, because Annie kept telling us the nightlight was doing funny things, didn’t you, sweetie?”

Matthew now spoke directly to his niece, and though she still clung close to him with her good hand, she looked at me and nodded while biting onto her lip.

“The light was flickering?” I asked.

She nodded again.

I got up off the couch and down onto the floor, folding my legs under me so I could kneel and get down to Annie’s face, where she could look at me properly.

“My name’s Ellie,” I said. “And like my friend Sam said, we fight monsters. All sorts of monsters. The boys are checking in your bedroom to see if they can figure out what sort of thing it was that hurt you. They’re very clever and very brave. Natasja told me the monster is called Pobo, is that right?”

She was still bravely looking me in the eye and I held her gaze carefully and tried to channel Sam at his most earnest and genuine, when his eyes got browner. She nodded at me with certainty.

“You don’t have to answer me, you can whisper it to Matthew. But can you tell me how you know its name? Did it speak to you?”

She shook her head, and then, in the tiniest, shakiest little voice, answered me. “He don’t talk,” she squeaked. “He touchded my head.”

Making sure to keep my movements small, I nodded my head that I understood. “So, Pobo touched you and then you knew his name? Do you know anything else about him?”

“Angry,” she whispered.

Well, everything seemed to be crystallising into a distinctly vengeful spirit sort of shape. Unfortunately, that didn’t get us any closer to knowing who it was and how we gank the son of a bitch.

“When he hurt your arm, what did he do?” I asked her. “Did he pull on it?”

She shook her head and looked up at Matthew. He gave her an encouraging little nod to go ahead. Then she looked back to me.

“Touchded me,” she said. “Touchded my arm.”

Knowing that didn’t immediately bring any genius ideas to mind, but the more of the story we had, the better. It was interesting that Pobo inflicted injury without actually doing the violent act. It seemed more calculated, but spirits didn’t tend to think in that way. My first instinct was that these were perhaps injuries that Pobo himself had when, or shortly before, he died. That would explain how they were exactly the same each time.

Annie stopped looking at me and turned back to face Matthew again. She pulled on his arm a little and he must have understood that signal, because he bent his head down so she could reach his ear. She stretched up to whisper something to him.

“That’s a good idea,” he told her. “Why don’t you take Ellie into the kitchen and show her?” Then he turned to me. “Annie’s drawn some pictures about Pobo and she wants to show them to you.”

“I’d really like to see them.” I held out one hand to her, making sure not to seem too grabby or forceful.

She let go of her uncle’s arm and very cautiously reached and and took my hand. She was so tiny, even for her age, and her little hand just barely wrapped around a few of my fingers. It was warm and a bit sweaty from gripping onto Matthew for so long, but I didn’t mind that at all.

She got to her feet, still holding my hand, but looking back at Matthew, who gave her an encouraging sort of smile. Once she was standing upright, I actually had to bend my back a little to keep hold of her hand, and I was slightly hunched over as she led me towards a door.

She gave one more look back at Tas and Matthew. Tas gave her a thumbs up, and that was apparently enough to reassure her as she picked up her speed a little and pulled me along behind her.


	79. Chapter 78: Research

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you’re trying to identify a dead child, research can be very distressing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, domestic violence, murder (talked about, not seen, and no more graphic than would ever be on the show itself).
> 
> I did my best to research, but I may know absolutely nothing about the law in the US, so if I’m wrong about anything, just pretend this is an AU in which I’m not.

“So what do you think?” asked Natasja.

She’d followed us in her own car, back to the hospital. Tonya took us into her office. She shared it with another doctor, but they usually worked different shifts, so it was a good place to talk in private. We didn’t want Tonya’s bosses overhearing us. Though the fact all these kids had similar injuries had caused some comment, as you’d expect.

We’d agreed in the car that I’d better explain everything in terms Tonya and Natasja would understand.

“It’s definitely a spirit of some kind,” I said. “Dean did a test with an EMF metre. That stands for Electromagnetic Field. We always get high readings in places where a ghost or spirit of some kind has been.”

“And you got high readings in Annie’s room?” asked Tonya.

“Off the scale,” Dean said. He’d told Sam and I that there were no powerlines or other sources of interference nearby, so we didn’t have to mention that was sometimes a problem. Better to keep it simple.

“Um… Uh… What about in the rest of the house?” asked Natasja.

“Good question,” Dean said and her cheeks flushed just the tiniest bit. As anybody’s would. “Nothing. Only room in the house with a reading.”

“There’s also the electrical surges that blew out the baby monitor and the security camera. Plus Annie said the night light flickered when Pobo was around,” I explained. “And that’s common with hauntings too. Spirits can’t always interact with objects physically, but they have an electric charge. We don’t know why that is.”

“You said it was a _vengeful spirit_ ,” Tas reminded me. “And Annie said it’s angry. Why do you think it’s hurting children?”

“Well, like I said before, often there’s no obvious logic, because a spirit sticking around on earth tends to go a little mental. But, I have two guesses.”

I explained my thought process to them. I’d already run it by the boys, who had agreed with my assessment. The injuries to the kids were not caused by actual violent blows, so it stood to reason Pobo was recreating a specific set of injuries. Since these were all on the right side of the body, it seemed to me like they might be wounds suffered in one incident. Broken arm, two broken fingers, cracked rib and a serious head wound. Potentially deadly.

To my mind, Pobo had to be either someone who had suffered these injuries or someone who had inflicted them. The most likely scenario for me, given the head wound, was that someone had murdered Pobo, and the murder was brutal.

“About the little girl who came in last night,” I said, turning to Tonya. “She got her injuries all at different times, but if they all happened at once, if a kid came in like that, what would you think the cause was?”

“Well, the arm breaks are spiral fractures,” she said. “So, I’d say someone pulled the arm and twisted it. The two broken fingers are an odd injury in a child, but seen occasionally in boxers or people who’ve been in a brawl. My guess would be that the kid had punched at someone bigger than them, probably a grown adult with a bit of strength. Then the adult has grabbed the forearm and broken it. But the head and ribs? Falling injury, maybe?”

“Could be they’ve been attacked, fought back and then got… I dunno, pushed off something, maybe?” asked Sam.

“Could be,” Tonya agreed.

“Does it matter?” asked Tas, with a little hesitation. “I mean… um… is it important? To getting rid of it?”

“Usually,” I said. “Because the way we kill a ghost is to salt the bones and then burn them, so we need to know where to look.”

“Oh… okay, sorry.”

I gave her a friendly smile. “You don’t need to be sorry, it’s a good question. But I’m worried it may not be a simple salt and burn job. Usually, a spirit haunts a place or a person.”

Usually, but not always. The ghost ship guy had chosen victims who’d been involved in the death of a family member. Otherwise, there’d been no connection between them. Whereas, in this case, we had thirteen victims with very strong similarities. They’d never met, but they were of similar age, had been through abuse and all had cases being prosecuted by Nastasja.

“Ellie, tell them about the name,” Sam said.

“Oh, oh yeah!” I’d forgotten. “So, I don’t think Pobo is likely to be a real name. But when Annie was showing me her drawings, the way she said his name made me realise something. At first I thought she was mumbling, but she doesn’t say “Pobo”. It’s more like _P-B-_ What if it’s his initials?” I made P and B noises, letting the sound pop out of my mouth explosively, like our drama teacher taught back in high school.

“Could also be a name a kid might struggle to pronounce,” Dean said, and I nodded in agreement.

“So, that’s where we’re at,” I said. “Next step is to go looking for a murder that fits the injury pattern and the Pobo name. And I’m guessing there’ll be a kid involved somehow. Tonya, can we head back to yours?”

“Why don’t you come to my office?” asked Tas. “If there was a murder with a kid involved, you might be able to find that in our past case records.”

“Actually, that’s a really great idea,” Sam said.

She smiled and looked away. I had thought the night before that Natasja was a bit nervous because Sam and Dean were such hotties. They had that effect on people. But looking at her now, it seemed more like regular shyness.

“All the kids who’ve been attacked are your cases,” Sam said. “So, it could be their abusive backgrounds are the connection. But it could also be your office itself.”

Natasja’s big eyes opened up wider. “You think it’s my fault?”

“Oh, no no no,” Sam reassured her. “No, not your fault. There might be something about the actual building, though.”

The colour came back to her cheeks. “Oh. Well, it’s a pretty old building.”

“Great,” Dean said. “Sam, why don’t you and Ellie go with Tas, and I’ll stay here, have a look at some of those medical records.”

I smirked. Yeah, Dean was totally staying at the hospital cos he wanted to read through victims’ medical records, a thing he had never thought it necessary to do before. It was totally about the work and not trying to get into Tonya’s pants.

“Yeah, okay!” I said, through a bark of laughter. “You make sure you check those records real thorough, dude.”

 

* * *

 

Tas concentrated on driving us to her office. Sam was riding shotgun and he tried a few times to start a conversation, but her answers were short. Not rude; she didn’t seem impolite at all, just like she had her head somewhere else. I was used to Dean spending minutes at a time turned towards Sam as they argued. It was refreshing to ride with someone who saw looking at the road as a key component of driving on it.

The District Attorney’s office was a nice looking building, a beautiful red-brick. The white columns were a bit old fashioned, and inside the main lobby area, the beige and pale green colour scheme had not aged well at all.

“How old’s the building?” asked Sam, as we came through the revolving door into the lobby.

“Um… mid seventies, I think,” Tas replied.

“Has anyone ever died here?” I asked. “That you know of?”

She nodded. “About fifteen years back, an ADA had a heart attack at his desk.”

Sam and I followed her lead to the elevator. “Doesn’t really sound like our suspect,” he said.

Tas agreed. “Yeah, apparently he was pretty old, and it was his third heart attack. Fourth floor.”

“Is it okay?” I asked, while Sam pressed the button. “Bringing us up to your office?”

“Oh yeah. I’m not really supposed to show you the case files, though. But, my boss saw the same tape I showed you, and when I told him Tonya knew someone who could look into it, he was okay with that. So, I think he’ll let us get away with it, on the quiet. If not, you can tell _me_ what to look for and I’ll do it by myself.”

I admired Natasja’s determination to get to the bottom of this mystery. She seemed willing to do whatever needed to be done. People were usually stunned and desperate for some other explanation. She accepted our word and just went with it.

The elevator doors opened onto a big open office area that looked busy. A guy gave Tas a wave as he walked past and then did a double take, lifting his head to get a proper look at Sam, who just gave that little awkward smile of his.

“That’s Andy,” Tas said. “My office is this way.”

She led us past the bustle of her coworkers. I wondered if they were all lawyers too. There couldn’t be enough crimes for all these people to work just on court cases. They wouldn’t have more than one case each. And this was only one floor of the building.

“Down there is Harry’s office,” Tas said, pointing to the far end of the room, where there was a big glass wall with a few green plants giving it some extra privacy. By the door, there was a desk area bigger than most of the others and a woman was there, her head down as she looked at the keyboard.

“Harry’s your boss?” asked Sam.

“He’s an ADA. He’s the one who goes to court and does the talking,” she explained. “My job is to do the preliminary stuff and the research, deal with what the family needs, then I go with him when it goes to trial, to help him and just to learn from him.”

That made sense to me, from what I’d seen on TV crime shows and stuff.

“So, are you the only one who deals with child abuse cases?” I asked, and she nodded, before opening the door of another glass-walled office. It was pretty cramped, but obviously Natasja had moved far enough up the pecking order to get her own office.

She had a desk chair and three comfy little chairs with arms. It was a very small space to fit a desk and four chairs, but I figured probably there were lots of kids who needed to bring one or two people to support them through the process.

“Sit wherever,” said Natasja. “I’ll just have a word with Harry.”

“She’s nice,” I said to Sam, as we each took a chair.

We talked about how nice Tas was for a bit, and when she still wasn’t back, we moved on to talking about Dean and Tonya.

“She will destroy him,” I said. “We’ll go back tonight and find him a broken husk of a man.”

Sam laughed. “She can’t be that good. Even you’re not immune to his… whatever it is he does.”

“No way, I’m a weak amateur! I’m Luke Skywalker on Tatooine. Talented and full of potential, but I’m no match for Vader yet.”

“Is Dean your father in this scenario?” Sam asked. “Cos… um…”

“Ew!” I squeaked, fighting off the mental image. “No! He’s just… he’s the bad guy and I’m the plucky kid who needs a mentor. Tonya’s Obi Wan. Or maybe Yoda.”

“But neither of _them_ can beat Vader either, that’s why they train Luke up to do it.”

Well, okay yeah, but I just meant that Tonya was my more experienced mentor and that she would not have the same vulnerabilities to Dean’s flirtatious charm that I did.

“No, but that’s not… Because Obi Wan was… Wait. Hang on.”

I ignored Sam’s teasing smile as I tried to rethink my metaphor. Okay, so not a Star Wars reference, then. Should have known better than to try and argue with Sam on that subject.

“Okay, so I’m Gandalf the Grey,” I began, and Sam was already trying not to laugh. “No! Stick with me here! I’m Gandalf, and Tonya is the superior wizard and my leader, Saruman the White. And I’m not ready to take on Sauron just yet, but when Tonya looks into the eye and switches sides, she’ll no longer be a wizard and I will become Gandalf the White and then I’ll be ready.”

Sam was laughing so hard he almost fell off the chair. “If Dean’s Sauron and Tonya’s Saruman, doesn’t that mean you’ll need to launch a couple of brave hobbits at them, or else fall to their alliance?”

“I… Shut up, Sam!”

He held up his hands in protest. “I’m just saying, I don’t think hobbits are the answer here…”

I picked a pen up off Natasja’s desk and flung it at him. “She’s my mentor, okay!? She’s better than me at… I dunno… not having sex with people!”

The pen had bounced off his shoulder and onto the floor. He was able to pick it up without even stretching, his crazy long arm easily reaching far enough. He held it in one hand, ready to flick it at me. Knowing he’d get it going at a painful speed, I was ready to duck as soon as it came my way.

It flew over my head, and I was about to grab it off the floor, when I saw Tas. Because there was a big window. An it looked onto the main office where all her coworkers had been able to watch Sam and I, her important professional ghost consultants, flicking stationary at each other.

Oops.

When Tas came in, she had something of a smile. She shut the door behind her and bent to pick the pen up as she passed it. Then she handed it to me without comment.

“So, Harry said I can’t show you the open cases, but I can let you see the old archive stuff. Truth is, he’s actually pretty superstitious, and that tape freaked him out as much as me.”

Just as she was sitting down, there was a knock and I could see that young guy from before, Andy, through the window. Tas waved to him and he opened the door.

“Harry says you need me to bring up old files. Kids who died?”

“Yeah, but might take a while to dig them all out,” Tas replied.

Andy shook his head. “Nah, they’re all filed separately. Think there’s a couple of boxes, though. They’re in the basement,” he said, nodding politely at Sam and I.

Even though we were mysterious strangers, Andy was making sure we were in the loop and following the conversation. That made me like him.

“I could give you a hand,” Sam offered.

Andy seemed very relieved by that. “I can’t let you in the records room, but it’d be great if you could help me carry them up.”

“No problem,” Sam said, getting out of his chair.

As he passed me, he subtly reached out and grabbed the smallest fistful of my hair, giving it a soft tug. What was he a fourth grader now? It didn’t hurt and obviously wasn’t meant to, but it did make me give a little squeak of surprise. Before I could retaliate, he was gone.

Well, we’d see about revenge later. If he wanted to play grade school games, he was messing with the wrong girl! My dad got called in to the school more than once during my acting-out phase. People felt sorry for me cos I had no mama, so I quickly learned I could get away with a little mischief.

Natasja was starting to clear some of the papers on her desk. I gestured towards a little stack, and she nodded that it was okay for me to touch it. I gathered it up and turned it upright so I could use the desk to straighten it all out.

“You’re taking this really well,” I said. Tas handed me a file folder and I slipped the pages inside. “Most people take a lot longer to accept this stuff.”

She nodded. “I guess I already freaked out before you came. When you said it was a spirit, that was just confirmation of what I already guessed.”

“Makes sense,” I said, handing her the file.

She put it together with another file and slipped both into her desk drawer. We both started shifting some of the stationary so there’d be more space to use the desk.

“So, how you holding up?” I asked, putting a couple of neon blue highlighters into a little puppy-face cup with some other pens.

“I’m feeling better about it. It’s good knowing we can actually do something about this, help all those kids.”

“It’s just you seem sort of nervous,” I told her. “That’s okay, this stuff is pretty scary…”

She smiled and a pink blush came over her cheeks. “It’s actually… it’s not the ghost thing at all. I just… Sam and Dean are a little scary.”

Scary? I’d never heard them described that way before. Scary hot, yes. But… there was something intimidating about them I supposed. Dean was over six foot, and his brother made him look short. They were both pretty built, and Sam was so broad. Sometimes their suits took the edge off, gave them that respectable, approachable appearance. But, once I thought about, I could see how these two massive guys could be scary to a stranger.

“They are kinda,” I told her. “But they’re sweeties, really. They’re badass, sure, and they can kill a vampire or two without breaking a sweat. But they’re nice. Dean likes to put on a tough guy act, like he don’t care. But he does. A lot. And Sam doesn’t even pretend like he ain’t a fluffy cupcake filled with sunshine.”

Tas giggled at the image. We’d made enough room on the desk now, so I leant back, figuring now was the time to stretch out my back muscles before I started a long session of reading files.

“How long have you been together?” she asked.

“Um,” I did some math in my head. “I’ve been hunting with the boys a bit more than six months. But we knew each other when we were kids.”

“I meant you and Sam,” she said.

I stared at her. “Huh?”

Again her cheeks started to develop a pinkish tinge and she looked down and away from me. “Oh, um… I thought you guys were… you know, a thing… I’m so sorry.”

I laughed. What was it about me and Sam that made everyone think we were boinking? It usually happened in bars and sometimes that was handy, but other times extremely inconvenient. Maybe it was just that he was an attractive guy, and me being the only woman around, they assumed we were together. Usually Dean was off looking to score. Pretty presumptuous logic, though. Sam might have been gay, for all anyone knew.

But Natasja didn’t mean any harm by it.

“It’s okay,” I said, still smiling. “I’m flattered you think I’m anywhere near something approaching his league.” She smiled back as I stopped and thought for a second. “Hmm… I guess the pen thing just now _was_ kinda flirty…”

“Kinda,” she agreed.

We kept the conversation up while we waited for Sam and Andy to come back with the files. Natasja was really nice, and we got on great. She made me laugh, and now the intimidating shadows of Winchesters were gone, she was pretty chatty. She was Dutch, originally, but she’d come over for college and then decided to stay after. She’d started at the DA’s office before she’d finished her law degree, and they’d kept her around. She liked doing the child abuse cases, though it could be really distressing at times. She said the way to get through it was to remember that you were doing your best to get safety and justice for those kids, and to have a healthy life outside the job, so the negative energy didn’t bring you down too much.

I was just talking to her about how cool Tonya had been when I first met her. She’d helped me out when I really needed it. She always said it was the right thing to do and she’d have done it for anyone. But she stuck around cos she liked me.

“I can see her doing that,” Natasja said, when I’d explained the story. “Tonya’s got such a strong drive to help people. She’s a great doctor.”

“I always knew she would be,” I said.

Sam and Andy were passing the window, two boxes each, balanced atop one another. I jumped up so I could open the door for them and they came in, treading carefully. I grabbed the top box from Andy, and he had a much easier time with the remaining one.

The four boxes were all there was. Some of the files looked quite thick, so maybe we wouldn’t be there too long.

“So where do we start?” asked Tas, once Andy had gone back to his desk.

“We each take a box and we look through them, one by one,” Sam said. “I think it’s pretty likely the wounds we’re seeing are what killed our ghost, don’t you?”

I nodded agreement. “Probably. So, let’s put aside any case file that includes a broken right arm, those two fingers on the right hand, a head wound or… What was the other?”

“Cracked ribs,” Tas said, reaching for a folder. “So it’s possible those four injuries could come from four different cases?”

“It’s unlikely,” Sam said. “But I’d rather take out the maybes now, than go through them all again if we don’t find one with all four. And remember it may not be the child who had those injuries. Check and see if the parents were ever hurt too.”

I peered into the box I’d left beside my chair. Pages and pages about poor little kids who got hurt and abused by people who were supposed to protect them. And I knew not one of them had a happy ending. All those kids had died before their lawyers could make them safe. Even if there weren’t as many death records as we sometimes went through, I could tell this one was going to be particularly harrowing.

With a sigh, I tried to mentally prepare myself, like Natasja said. I was helping. I was gonna find this spirit’s name and even though burning the bones seemed like a violent act, I’d always believed it brought them peace.

 

* * *

 

“I found him!”

We’d all been reading in silence. I’d stopped every now and again to take a deep breath or just stare into space for a moment. One time I felt the prickle of tears in the corner of my eyes, but I managed to keep it together. I made a note to call Dad that night, though. I was so lucky to have a loving father who did everything he could to make me happy.

It was Natasja who called out suddenly, and when Sam and I looked up, she slapped the file down onto her desk and turned it around for us to see.

“Nicholas Bowen,” she said. “Age eight. He died in 1989. His father was charged with assault of both Nicholas and his mother. Before it went to trial, he found them at the apartment they were living in. He killed Nicholas, and hurt the mom pretty bad. But the little boy’s injuries match, look.”

She showed us the kid’s file. It was grim reading, and I only glanced over the top page. I didn’t really want to know in any detail what an evil man had done to a defenceless little boy. It was enough to see that his cause of death was head trauma, and he had the other three injuries too.

Sam was apparently reading the whole thing. Seeing I was done, he picked up the file to read it more easily. Tas was frowning as she looked across the desk at me.

“I’m gonna get some water, okay.”

She squeezed between my chair and the wall and headed out into the busy office area. Maybe I should have gone with her, stretch my legs and try to pretend the world wasn’t a horrific and brutal place for a while.

“Get this,” Sam said. “Father’s name was Paul Bowen. PB.”

“Pobo,” I muttered. It had seemed at first like the spirit was the person who’d died of those injuries, but it still made sense it could be the one who’d inflicted them. “So… you think the spirit is Nicholas? Or the asshole calling himself a father?”

“My money’s on the asshole.”

“Mine too.”

Normally we’d hack into death records, see what happened to the kid’s remains and whether the father had died too. It would usually only take Sam a half hour to get into a database like that. He was pretty well-practiced. But there was no need, since Tas would probably be able to get into those records easily and legally.

She was back pretty quick, with two of those little white cups they have at water coolers. She handed one to me, and put a warm hand on my back in the process.

I took the cup and found it was chilled, so it was definitely that filtered water cooler stuff. It always tasted much fresher than tap water, especially when it was cold. I gratefully took it as she passed the other cup to Sam. Then she went back to her seat again.

She didn’t say anything about it. No “it’s okay to be upset by this” or anything else that might have drawn attention to my slightly watering eyes or red face. Though I knew he’d understand, I didn’t really want Sam to think I was too emotional to handle this kind of situation. I was fine, I could do whatever it took to get a job done and a spirit ganked. But I preferred Sam to think I was super professional about it all. She even gave him some water too, so it didn’t look like she was doing it because of my stinging pink eyes.

“So what now?” she asked.

I was slowly sipping my water but Sam swallowed his in one quick flip of the wrist. He kept the cup in his hands, looking at it and turning it round as he answered her.

“Can you find out where this kid is buried? And about the father, Paul? Is he dead and if so, where are the bones?” Sam asked all this, still turning the cup in his hands.

“You have to salt them and burn them, right?”

“Right,” I said, in between two sips of refreshing, soothing ice water.

If he was dead, it was a shame. I’d have liked to burn his bones while he was still using them. But I kept that to myself and took deep breaths in and out, with the cup still to my lips, to disguise it. It would be best if Natasja could find out where the right remains were so we could salt and burn, no fuss. I wanted more than anything to finish this case without having to talk to that poor baby’s mother. It had been nearly twenty years. She didn’t need us coming around and dredging up the nightmare she’d lived through.

 _Please let her live in peace_ , I thought, finishing my water.

Natasja had stopped typing and was now looking at her screen. Sam saw I was done, and reached over to take my cup.

“You okay?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Sure. You?”

“Pretty mad,” he said. “This stuff is hard to read.”

“Hey.” Natasja looked up. “Nicholas was cremated, his mother signed for the ashes, so after that I don’t know what happened to them. But Paul Bowen is dead. Died in prison, heart attack.”

“So, Pobo could be him?” Sam asked.

“He died October 29th last year. Guess when my first kid came in with a broken arm?”

“October 30th?” I asked, and before I’d even finished saying it, she was nodding.

I actually managed to smile, just slightly. Sure it was horrific and distressing, but at least this case had a straightforward easy answer. We’d had to go through some awful reading to find it, but everything pointed in one direction, it all made sense and, at least so far, there’d been no weird complications. It was kinda weird Paul Bowen wasn’t haunting a single location or person, but it was not completely unheard of for that to happen.

“Where was he buried?” I asked.

She looked at the screen again. “Hmm… No one claimed the body. So the state had him cremated.”

Well.

Shit.


	80. Chapter 79: Teamwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and Sam have identified the spirit. But, it turns out there are some monsters a Winchester can’t kill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Child abuse, domestic violence, murder
> 
> Also, this chapter got way longer than intended, but I decided to roll with it.

We scanned Natasja’s office, and Sam did a surreptitious sweep of the cubicles outside, but we didn’t get any significant reading. A couple of little spikes happened, but it was probably the normal result of so many computers and phones and such all in once place.

Tas told her boss what we’d found, and he told her to keep the file but try and keep the whole thing low key. He didn’t want to see us, I guess so he could claim to know nothing about what was going on. The story the boss had told was that Sam and I were checking up on procedures, making sure everything possible had been done and that the DA’s office wasn’t neglectful or culpable in the deaths of the children.

Sam was rocking his FBI suit, while I had the collared shirt and stockings thing going on, so we looked as professional as we were ever going to get. To add extra credence to the story, Sam and I asked Dean to come pick us up, so we left the building at least ninety minutes before Natasja. We also left the boxes in her office, as we’d surely take longer than a few hours to read them properly. But we snuck Nicholas Bowen’s file out.

We went down the street a little ways and waited on the pavement for Dean to pick us up.

“Well, he answered the phone quick enough,” I said. “So not mid-coitus…”

I was walking up and down along a little concrete ledge that separated the pavement from a garden bed. There were a few brown thorny rose stems, but despite the danger of falling in, I relished the opportunity to stretch out my arms and legs while using my brain for something other than reading. We’d been looking through those files for hours. Andy had included us in his lunch-run, so I had been stuck in that one chair right through, just reading all day.

Sam was watching me walk, keeping balance with my arms out my sides. “Actually, I’m pretty sure he did that once… Answered his phone, I mean. While, er… in the act.”

Classic Dean. “Multi-tasking, huh?”

Sam smiled. “Yeah. So… what do you think? What’s our next move?”

I’d been asking myself that ever since we’d found out our guy was already cremated. “I dunno. We’ve _definitely_ got the right guy. I guess maybe we go talk to the ex-wife, but I don’t wanna do that. It’s been nearly twenty years. She doesn’t need us dredging all that shit back up.”

“Agreed.”

I lost my balance and began to fall. Sam instinctively reached forward, though he was way too far from me. But I managed to land on my feet on the sidewalk. I climbed right back up and kept going, while he sat at one end, one knee jiggling up and down; apparently he was restless too.

“Did Dean say he’d found anything helpful at the hospital?” I asked. “EMF or… I dunno, anything?”

Sam shook his head. I had come back to his side again, and I spun on my foot to go back the other way. The street was quiet, so I didn’t have to be nearby or looking at him to hear him.

“I think we should hit the books when we get to Tonya’s,” he said. “I might have seen something similar to this in one of your Dad’s books one time.”

“What kind of similar?” I asked.

“That figure on the tape,” he said. “I keep seeing that image in my head, but on a page. The picture was kinda red tinted, whereas that tape is greenish.”

I thought about the man-shaped spirit we’d seen on the tape from Annie’s bedroom. I couldn’t recall seeing anything like it before, and I’d been the one who scanned every page of the books. But I didn’t have a memory as good as Sam’s. It might be worth giving Dad a call, in case it was in one of the books I hadn’t scanned.

“You sure you saw it at Dad’s?” I asked.

“No. But I can’t think where else I could have seen it. It’s definitely not in Dad’s journal.”

I stopped walking and looked up. Journal? Suddenly, I realised I _had_ seen it too.

“Sam? Was it in Mom’s journal? About this big?” I showed him with my hands, holding my thumb and forefinger out. “Sticky taped to the corner of a page, right?”

“Right!” he said. “Yeah. It’s a photo, I think. Or maybe a really good drawing.”

I was surprised by the enthusiasm with which I nodded. This was an exciting development. Within seconds, we had gone from totally lost to knowing exactly where to look next.

Sam saw the Impala before me, and stood up. I decided to jump down from the little ledge, landing beside him just as Dean pulled up.

“So, how was your _thorough investigation_?” I asked, once we were all in and back on the road.

“It’s like Tonya said. Every kid has one of those four injuries. The x-rays are creepy. You can lay them on top of each other and see the same breaks.”

That was interesting, but not really what I’d meant by the question. I wanted him to admit Tonya had sent him packing, as she most definitely would have done.

“What about your _other_ investigation?”

I could see his scowl in the rear vision mirror. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That was enough to amuse me, and I decided against teasing him further. Best to let the poor guy retain some of his dignity. Instead, I started to explain what we’d found. Sam took up parts of the story, and by the time we’d finished the short drive back to Tonya’s apartment, he was completely filled in.

* * *

Tonya had given me her spare key, so we let ourselves in. I made a bee-line straight for mom’s journal. I got my boots off and neatly sat them by the door, then got myself comfy on the couch right away.

I flipped through the book quickly, searching for a red-tinged rectangle that might be the picture Sam and I remembered. Sam sat next to me, computer at the ready on the coffee table, just in case. Dean was leaning against the wall, looking through poor little Nicholas Bowen’s file.

“Here!” I gave a triumphant shout. I held the book open, lifting it up for the boys to see.

Dean came closer and peered at it. “You’re right. That’s our guy.”

The picture _was_ a photograph. But it also wasn’t. It was an old polaroid of a watercolour painting. I could see some of the gilt frame. The painting was of a room, all wood-panelled furniture and fancy wallpaper, sort of eighteenth century looking. There was a red tinge to everything, and the figure in the center of the room was very much man-shaped. It was tall, darkest in the center and blurring and fading a little but still very clearly defined as something separate from the air around it. It held one hand forward, just as our own spirit did when it disabled the security camera.

There was also a second polaroid, this one of a room very similar to the one in the painting. It might have been the same room, but at a different time, or else the painter had taken some artistic licence. They had the same marble fireplace and the window was in the same place. Some of the furniture was in both, but not all.

“So, what is it?” asked Sam. “Ghost?”

I turned the book back around to read. I’d already read through the thing so many times, I knew it by heart, but I’d never paid much attention to the pictures. I just wanted to read Mom’s words. But after a brief skim, I remembered the story and I could summarise it for the boys. It took several pages in the book, and there was other stuff in between, but I remembered it.

“This guy called Harry sent her the pictures. It was a fancy old house, got used as a hospital in the Civil War. This ghost figure thing appeared for a few days every forty-seven years. It attacked people just by touching them. Came back several nights in a row, and gave them the same injuries, in the same order.”

“Kinda like our guy,” Sam said.

Dean nodded. “Except World’s Worst Dad doesn’t injure his victims in the same order every time.”

“Yep. So the painting was done by a guy who saw it back in the day, but it only killed women. Mom did some digging for Harry, cos the time for its appearance was coming up. She found this thing called an _Iratus_. That’s from Latin.”

Sam spoke Latin almost as well as me. “Angry?”

“Yeah. They’re a lot more solid than a typical ghost. It’s more like a poltergeist. But poltergeists aren’t the spirits of the dead, and Iratus are.”

A poltergeist was formed of malevolent energy, while a ghost was the spirit of a specific dead person. The Iratus was something in between. The spirit of someone dead but so violent and angry that it had more corporeal presence than a ghost would.

“So how do we kill it?” Dean asked. “You said the guy’s body was burned, right?”

“Right. He’s so angry he doesn’t _need_ his physical remains. His malice has its own presence, which is why he can get into all these different houses.”

Sam nodded as I said this, and I could see his jaw click, which meant he was either secretly angry, or thinking. Or both, I guess.

He had read the journal too. “Didn’t it… There’s something about it being killed by a victim?”

I sighed. “Yeah. You can trap it in a ring of salt, but you need an iron blade to kill it. And the blade has to be wielded by one of its victims.”

“His victims are kids,” Dean said.

Yeah. That was gonna be a problem.

* * *

I was nervous, eating inside Matthew and Alison’s pristine white-carpeted house. Supposing I dropped a piece of my sweet and sour pork? They’d insisted on getting plates for us, though the boys and I were much more used to eating out of the takeout boxes. I felt like I was on my best behaviour, visiting a friend’s house for a sleepover.

When we arrived at their house, the family had already eaten. Tas and Tonya decided to grab us some takeout. They came back with more Chinese than any five people could possibly eat, even if one of them was Sam.

Now we were seated in their neat living room, trying not to look like total slobs as we finished our meals. We’d explained the situation to Matthew and Alison, and they wanted to help, of course.

“And you’re sure it will work?” Matthew asked. “What if it… Will Annie get hurt?”

The kid was the very youngest of Pobo’s victims. Probably an older child would have been a better bet, but none of the other children was in the care of adults who were guaranteed to believe our story.

“We gotta lay the salt trap first,” said Dean. “So, if that doesn’t work, we won’t bring Annie into it at all.”

Matthew nodded, but with a frown. I didn’t blame him for being apprehensive about the whole thing. His niece was so young and so shy and she’d been through so much. I’d want to keep my kid away from danger too. But ultimately, she was in more danger if we didn’t stop Pobo. The kid with the head wound had passed away, much to Natasja’s distress. There had been a few tears, though Tonya handled it okay. I’d mostly managed to avoid crying, though Sam might have noticed some redness when he caught me washing my face with cold water in Tonya’s bathroom.

According to Annie, Pobo always came after her uncle and aunt went to bed. She was too young to have a good grasp on time, and there wasn’t a clock in her bedroom. We knew that Pobo always appeared in her room, even when she wasn’t there. But he’d never shown up while Alison had stayed in the bed with her. It seemed to me like he could sense an adult’s presence, but couldn’t tell if Annie was there or not without checking.

So, right after they finished eating, the boys got to work. Matthew helped them rig up Annie’s bedroom, while I took the time to gain more trust from Annie. She had these two dolls, sweet little homemade ragdolls. Her mummy made them, she told me, before she went away to be an angel, a revelation that threatened to make me cry again.

Muffet was her favourite, but she gave her to me to play with, because she had pretty brown hair like mine. She wasn’t wrong. I’d often felt like my hair was made of wool, clumping together and clinging to my hairbrush. The other doll was obviously meant to look like its owner. It had red hair and freckles drawn onto the face with marker.

I looked at Muffet. Annie’s mother had been talented. The doll looked like it was professionally made, with perfect tiny stitching. She was wearing a blue dress with a white pinafore thing, and those had been carefully cut and sewn too, fitting perfectly to the doll like professionally tailored haute couture. It was clear why she was called Muffet, too. There was a big felt spider sewn onto the shoulder of her pinafore.

“Miss Muffet seems very brave,” I told Annie. “She’s not running from her spider at all.”

“Spi-er comes off. Look!”

She showed me how the spider was attached to the dress by velcro. Cute.

“I can’t remember what Miss Muffet eats,” I lied. “Do you remember?”

“Currs and wheys. But I don’t know what those is.”

“Me either.” It was actually true that time. What are curds? Isn’t bean curd a thing? And I had no idea what whey was. It didn’t really sound appetising.

By the time Sam came back with his computer, Annie and I were deeply involved in helping Muffet and her red-haired friend Lulu go shopping. They’d bought all the important things we could think of, taking it in turns to say what the dollies were buying. They had candy, of course, and a TV and shoes. I’d made sure they picked up toilet paper cos that’s important, and Annie said they had to get a puppy too. That’s always a sensible purchase.

“Miss Muffet is buying curds and whey,” I said. “Maybe she can tell us what it is.”

Annie had a soft, short little giggle. The first few times I heard it, I wondered if maybe laughing wasn’t something she was supposed to do, because it almost sounded like she was trying to hush herself, and not get too loud. I hoped so much that she was young enough to forget what had come before, and remember the love Matthew and Alison had for her. But on the other hand, I didn’t want her to forget the mother who had taken so much time and careful attention to make those beautiful dolls for her.

“Miss Lulu is buying a white pony,” she said.

I gasped and moved my doll side to side like she was talking. “Miss Lulu, how are we gonna fit the pony in our shopping cart?”

Annie gave her little gasp giggle again and made Miss Lulu answer. “It’s a magic cart.”

“Of course it is.” I turned Miss Muffet to look at me and waggled my finger at her sternly. “Silly Miss Muffet, it’s a magic cart.”

Sam had been talking to Tonya and Tas, but I could see he was looking over at me a lot. Figuring he wanted to talk to me, I left Muffet in Annie’s excellent care, and hurried over to speak to him.

He smiled. “Seems like she’s really taken to you.”

“Hope so. This is a lot to ask of a five year old.”

I looked over at that sweet little girl, playing with her dolls. She had one in each hand and was jibbering quietly to herself, as she pretended they were talking to each other. As I’d been playing with her, she’d even made sure Miss Lulu used her pleases and thankyous.

Poor thing had already been through so much in her short life. Now she was being targeted by a man so cruel and malevolent that his hatred had carried on living after he was dead.

And okay, maybe Annie had seen her mother murdered, in horrific circumstances. That was probably a factor in why I felt so connected to the kid. I could relate. But she was also such a lovely girl. She was very shy, but once I’d broken through her shell, I’d found she was creative, and funny. She’d asked me so timidly to play with her and gave me her favourite doll, because it looked like me and I was a guest. What a little sweetheart!

“How’d you get so good with kids?” Sam asked.

I shrugged. “I dunno. I think maybe the key is to like them. They can sense it. So, you got everything rigged up?”

“Yeah. I just hope he comes tonight. He already busted one camera. What if he decides this house is a no-go?”

I’d thought of that possibility too, and I sighed. “Yeah. But it doesn’t sound like the Iratus is a great strategist. It’s only operating on anger, so it’s possible the previous attempts to thwart it might make it more likely to come back here. It’s a revenge-monster, after all.”

“Good point,” said Sam. Then his beautiful, contagious smile spread over his face, dimples and all. “Looks like someone needs your help.”

When I turned around, Annie was waving meekly at me, Lulu and Muffet sitting side by side in her lap.

We couldn’t have someone go into the bedroom with Annie, because whenever “Arny Aliston” had tried that, Pobo had seemed to know, and not come into the room.

I had to keep thinking of the spirit as Pobo. In a way it was Paul Bowen, a disgusting man who had murdered his own little boy. But somehow I doubted even a man as vicious as that would actually feel compelled to go into the houses of children he’d never met and hurt them. People who hurt their kids or wives or whatever do it for a reason, and the reason is power. My friend Jody, Sheriff of Sioux Falls, told me that it was always about control and power. She said guys like Paul Bowen wanted to be in control of the family, and the physical abuse was a way of keeping them afraid. If they were afraid, they would be easier to control, according to Jody. Apparently sometimes she had to let them out of lockup because the poor victim was too scared to even press charges.

I had a boyfriend sort of like that once. He never hit me or anything like that, lucky for me. But he made me kinda scared anyway, and I never really knew why. I was State Karate Champion at the time, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t kick six kinds of shit out of the guy if he ever hurt me. But somehow, when he was angry at me, I totally forgot that I was the one physically stronger.

One day, he threatened to kill me. Not an angry outburst, but scarier somehow. He was real quiet when he said it and you don’t need the details, so let’s just say he was _specific_.

This was during college, and I was so scared I called Jody (just a Deputy then) and asked her what to do. So I took him to a crowded coffeeshop on campus, told him I wanted to end it, and reminded him that I could kick his ass and that I knew lots of cops. I didn’t mention my Dad’s extensive gun collection, but I could see in his face that he remembered. Jody had also said I should inform the school and the RAs of my dorm.

Long story short, everything turned out okay for me. I guess he thought I wasn’t an easy enough target. But I always wondered what happened to the next girl, you know? Maybe she wasn’t as strong as me. Maybe she didn’t know a Sheriff’s Deputy. For all I knew, he could be Annie’s asshole father.

Anyway, from what Jody said and my own experience, hurting children like that was about power and control, of the kid, or maybe of the other parent. Paul Bowen was that guy. So Pobo was him but… more. Pobo seemed to be the spirit of the man, but beefed up with extra angry juice. Guy died so angry that he’d got life in prison for his crime, that he turned into a malevolent spirit, and just kept doing it to more innocent little kids.

Pobo clearly had some capacity to think like a man still, if it had sensed when Alison was around. So, we had her go to bed with Matthew, just like normal. Then Tas, Tonya and the boys set up camp in the home-office next to Annie’s room. They had salt guns, coffee, playing cards and books. With the door open a crack, they were spending the night in there, ready when I needed them.

Annie and I stayed downstairs. I had my book, two of those energy soft drinks (my stakeout beverage) and Sam’s laptop on the coffee table in front of me. He’d rigged it up to the new security camera and all I had to do was check it every few minutes, to see if Pobo was materialising. Sam and I had walkie talkies, and he checked in now and again, to make sure I was still alert and awake.

Annie had fallen asleep long ago. She’d curled up on the couch beside me, clutching Miss Lulu, so I had just covered her over with her pink sheep blanket and set myself up beside her. Matthew had told me she was a light sleeper, even before she was being haunted. But she seemed to be okay, just kicking occasionally. I could see her breath rise and fall sometimes. Maybe she felt safe knowing there was a monster hunter beside her.

It was well after 2am, and Sam had just radioed in. Tas and Dean had both fallen asleep, and he’d let them, because Tonya was awake to keep him company. I’d told them nothing was happening on my end. But then it did.

My technique was to look up at the computer screen every time I got to the end of a page of my book. Smart, right? Sam had interrupted halfway through a page, so I kept reading, and when I got to the bottom, I glanced up. And back down. Then I realised what I’d seen and looked up again.

Very slowly, I kept my book in my right hand, while I reached downward with my left. I picked up the walkie talkie, and waited until it was at my ear before I turned it on.

“Sam. He’s here…” I whispered.

“Great,” Sam said. “I’ll wake Dean. You head upst…”

“No. He’s _here_ ,” I hissed. “By the window.”

There was a hiss and a crackle. “Shit. We’re coming…”

“Don’t,” I warned him. “He’s still half formed. Don’t scare him.”

“Ellie, this wasn’t the plan…”

“It’s the plan now,” I said. “I’ll call you and leave the line open.”

“Be careful.” It was pretty redundant, but sweet of him to worry.

Keeping my eyes on my book, I wondered how much of human thought Pobo had left. He knew Annie wasn’t in her own bed, but was he aware I was in the room with her? Still pretending to read, I put down the walkie talkie and picked up my phone instead. With one hand, and only three buttons, I was able to call Sam. With the phone to my ear, I waited for Sam to pick up.

He answered on the second ring.

“Wait…” I whispered, and then turned on speaker phone and left my cell sitting on the arm of the couch.

The plan was that when he started to appear, the guys would be ready to rush in and help us, while Tas and Tonya went to wake Matthew and Alison (if they weren’t awake already. God knows I would be!). So, they were probably doing that, I figured, still holding my book near my face, but not reading one word.

Looking over the top of the book, I could see that Pobo was getting darker. Just like on the tape, he started as just a black blob in the middle of the room, a little higher than my hips, maybe. It was like a paint smudge in mid air. As it got darker, it also expanded, the edges growing out as it slowly formed the rough shape of a man.

So the location was not as planned. But so far, everything else was what we’d expected and practiced. So, time to wake Annie.

I put my book down carefully beside the computer and rubbed Annie’s back. Leaning down over her, I kept a careful eye on Pobo.

“Annie, sweetie. It’s time to wake up.”

She rolled over onto her back and opened her eyes. Blinking at me, she lifted one of her little fists to rub at her eyes. Poor kid, it was close to three in the morning.

“It’s me, Ellie. Do you remember what we practiced last night, honey?”

She gave me a nod, but it was a very timid one, and her mouth was set into a frown, while she got a little crinkle in her forehead that reminded me of Sam, when he was very earnest and serious.

“Okay, up you pop,” I whispered, but Annie was staring at the blob of Pobo, now starting to form something similar to arms and legs. “It’s okay, he can’t hurt you. Remember what we talked about?”

I’d explained to Annie that I’d hunted lots of monsters like Pobo before, which was not entirely untrue. According to Sam’s research, it couldn’t touch her until it had fully materialised. I also couldn’t trap it either. If I lay a salt ring around it too soon, it would just flee, disappearing and losing us the chance to kill the dreadful thing.

With a little more coaxing and encouragement, and assurance that Miss Lulu and Miss Muffet weren’t scared, I got Annie sitting up. Her bare feet dangled in front of her as she shuffled closer to me.

I’d made sure to have two of everything, so she could feel in control, like she was helping me. A great idea of Natasja’s. So I asked Annie to get the salt off the table. There was one canister for me and one for her.

“He’s nearly here,” I whispered. “You see his hands?”

She nodded, her eyes wide and even her freckles almost white. I clutched my salt canister and she did the same, hugging it close to her chest. We’d practiced on Sam and Dean, throwing salt on them when they got too close to us.

“That’s good. Hold it real tight. Now, what about your stick?”

She bit her lip and released her grip with one hand so she could bend to pick up her iron rod. Some of the salt was shaken out of the canister and onto the floor, but she came upright again, a rod in one hand, salt in the other. The rod wouldn’t actually do anything, because ganking an Iratus takes an iron blade. But I needed to give her something to hold.

Clutching everything to her, she looked up at me.

I reached down to my belt to grab the knife. It was probably more of a dagger than a knife, but that’s beside the point. As long as it was pointy and had a sharp edge.

“Okay. You look like you’re ready to hunt monsters. What do you do when I say go?”

“Wait,” she whispered.

“Good girl. I’ll catch him and then we’ll get him together. Now, Sam and Dean are listening and they’re going to run down here to help us so don’t be scared.”

“Sam’s tall and nice,” she said. “Dean’s funny.”

I smiled. She’d been slightly less wary of the boys, once she’d seen that people she trusted liked them, but she’d still kept a bit of distance. She’d allowed her Uncle to hold her hand while he talked to Dean, but she’d been very nervous about it.

“That’s right…”

Pobo had almost no rough edges left. I had to get him once he was fully materialised, but before he could touch Annie. Or me. We had no idea what would happen if he touched someone who wasn’t his intended victim, but it seemed they’d probably be hurt in the same way as all the kids. And anyway… he’d changed his whole MO, so maybe I _was_ the target now. Maybe he knew I was after him.

One of his arms started to move. That was it! He couldn’t move until he’d fully materialised. I burst towards him and started letting the salt fall. Just a circle around him, that was all I needed. I usually drew the salt around the potential victim, not the spirit, but this was sort of the same.

“Ellie!!!”

I was almost done with the circle when Annie screamed. I thought he’d hurt her until I felt the pain. Nowhere specific, just crippling pain throughout my whole body, making me double over, dropping my salt and my knife.

_Bitch! Bitch! Scream bitch!_

His voice was like nails down a blackboard, mixed into a jet engine roar. The sound of it filled up my entire body and rattled inside my head and my gut. But I’d only done three quarters of a salt circle and I _had_ to finish, before he could hurt Annie.

_Whore can’t control!_

I kicked out at the salt canister. It had spilt on the floor, and if I just pushed it a little way, it would push salt ahead of it, closing the circle.

I had no energy for anything but kicking that canister, and covering my ears, but that couldn’t get his screeching out of my head.

_No! Kill! Death!_

I rolled over, away from him and away again. As soon as I got out of his reach, I was able to hear again. The screeching had gone, and the feeling of having him inside my brain too. How did a five year old cope with that? No wonder she’d screamed. There was still a lot of pain. Everywhere.

Before I’d had time to register much more, someone was pulling me to my feet. I recognised the leather and pine scent, before I took in Dean’s jacket or the roughness of his hand. He yanked me upward and stood beside me, hands on my shoulders, to help me keep balance.

“I dropped the knife…” I told him, looking over at Pobo.

He was trapped within my very untidy salt circle. It’s hard to say how a figure of pitch black, with no face, can _look angry_. But he did. I could see the fury in his shadow face, the way I’d heard it in my head and I was still reeling from feeling it inside my body.

His arms, or sense of arms, or whatever they were, raised up as he formed fists and struck them both against some invisible barrier. It was sort of like the way demon smoke flattens out when it encounters a salt line, but more defined than smoke, of course. I could almost hear the fists pounding against the boundary I’d made.

Annie… where was Annie? She was hiding behind Matthew, and that was the first time I realised everyone else was in the room too. They must have heard Annie calling me. Or had they heard _me_? I probably screamed when Pobo touched me, the pain was everywhere at once. For a moment it had felt like I _was_ pain.

Satisfied I was okay, Dean let go of me and stooped to grab the knife. I took it from him, absently staring at Pobo as he silently slammed his fists again and again. Maybe that’s why it was so eerie. The silence was so… unnatural. A creature of such rage and malice, but totally silent, unless it got inside your own head.

With a brief thanks, I took the knife from Dean and went back to Annie. With my free hand, I reached between her Uncle and Aunt, and took her hand. She had dropped her iron rod, but was still clutching the salt to her, like it was the only thing between her and death. There was no colour whatsoever in her face.

“Did Pobo hurt you?” she squeaked.

Though I could still feel the pain deep inside every bone, I shook my head. “I’m fine. What do you say we get rid of a monster?”

She let me lead her out of the safety and closer to Pobo. First she put down the salt, and then we started to take tiny steps. Her movements were so tentative, and I started to worry Pobo’s anger would become sufficient to blow away the salt. But how could I rush her? How could I be impatient for a tiny little girl to look a monster in the face and stab it?

“Three more steps,” I said, and while she clung onto one of my hands, I put the knife in her other, and wrapped her fingers around the hilt.

She looked at it, and I could feel her other hand shaking, nestled inside my palm.

But even if it did need an iron blade, that didn’t mean _only_ an iron blade, right? Struck by an idea, I reached into my pocket. My pink flick knife was there, and I had it open and wielded properly in one swift movement.

“Let’s do it together, Annie,” I told her. “Hold it tight like this.”

I showed her my knife and she held hers up to show me the hold she had on it.

“Fantastic!” Pobo silently thumped down against his invisible prison again. “Ready?” Annie bit her lip and gave two decisive nods. I gripped her hand tighter.

“One. Two. Three…”


	81. Chapter 80: Guardian Angels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of Pobo is a little messier than Ellie would like. Plus also, it means saying goodbye to little Annie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Child abuse, domestic violence, murder, brief mention of drink spiking

Annie no longer wore her sling, but her right arm was still in a cast. She had the use of her fingers though, and they gripped onto my own hand like an iron vice. She was little and injured, but she must have been full of adrenalin. We both had our knives in our weaker hands, but that was just how it had to be.

Watching Annie, I thrust my own knife in the rough general area of Pobo. We’d done some practice, and I could see her eyes narrow as she took in a gulp of air. She was concentrating hard. The iron blade penetrated the strange black nothingness of Pobo’s body, and without waiting another moment, I dropped my knife, scooped Annie up and dove towards the safety of the couch behind us.

But something pulled me backward. There was a tightness around my waist, like a belt buckled too tight. I was moving backwards while running forwards. It had to be Pobo, holding onto me. So I threw Annie away from me, onto the soft cushions of the couch, hoping they would be enough to protect her when she landed.

The tightness got worse, and spread up into my chest as I struggled to get away. My only terrified thought was that Annie had missed, but she couldn’t have, because I’d seen her hit him, the knife swallowed up into his emptiness.

I couldn’t breathe and everything started to go black, and then suddenly I was hitting the ground. Hard. I fell down onto my back, and felt the impact reverberate through every bone I had. For a moment, I just lay there, trying to get back the oxygen I’d had squeezed out of me. Everything was still a little blurry, but I could recognise Sam, crouching down beside me.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, and started to get up, but he reached down a hand to me. I took it gratefully, and let him pull me to my feet.

My salt circle was gone, and so was Pobo. Even the iron knife Annie had held. It must have disappeared along with its target.

Worried I might have thrown her too hard, I looked for Annie right away. Matthew had gone to her and was hugging her close while the poor little thing sobbed. Even though it was what needed to be done, I still felt awful for putting the kid through it. Logically, I knew Pobo had already broken her arm and would have hurt her again. But all my heart knew was that I’d put a knife in a little girl’s hand and asked her to stand up and fight something that terrified her.

She’d done it though, like a tiny Winchester, pushing herself to do what she had to, and coming out of it alive.

It was my guilt that stopped me going over there and checking on her myself. Matthew seemed to have the crying situation under control, and after all, he was family, while I was just the lady who befriended her so I could make her do something scary.

I didn’t realise I was shaky on my feet until Sam caught me. I found myself holding onto him as he led me to the other couch. I went down pretty heavy onto my ass, but thankfully I didn’t pull Sam down with me.

He sat himself down beside me and I could feel his bulk, though I couldn’t quite see his face. My vision was going all blurry again.

“Just breathe,” he said, as I leant forward, gasping for air. I felt his hand on my back. “Deep breaths. In… Out…”

I breathed out alright.

I breathed out vomit, all over the pristine white carpet.

* * *

 

I had really vague memories. Tonya saying something to me, and Natasja in the room. I think I went to the toilet in a little bathroom with blue towels on a high shelf. Curtains were opened and closed. I’d wake up shivering and Sam brought me more blankets.

When I woke up, for the last time, it was bright out. The bed was much softer and comfier than I was used to, and it was a queen size, all to myself. Someone had also managed to get some nice feeling pyjamas on me. Were they silk? That seemed extra generous, since for all they knew I was gonna puke again.

I got out of the bed, still feeling light-headed. Maybe I was just hungry. I managed to make it to the little attached bathroom, and there were the blue towels like I remembered. Everything was very vague, but I felt awake, rested. I’d definitely been put to bed by someone, Tonya and Alison, maybe?

I took it easy down the stairs and was still halfway down when I heard a little squeak.

Annie was peeping around the corner from the living room, her ginger curls falling in front of her face. I thought she’d run from me, but she did the exact opposite. With more animation than I’d seen from her before, she came out and ran up the stairs to me. I held onto the railing to keep myself upright as she cannoned into my leg.

“You got sick,” she said, into my hip, as she pulled back a little way.

I took her good hand, and she walked with me down the stairs. “Well, I’m okay now,” I told her. “Are my friends here?”

She shook her head. “You been asleep two days, but they been coming lots.”

Two days? Wow, the whole experience must have worn me out more than I realised. Annie led the way, pulling me into the kitchen, where Alison was wiping down the marble benchtops.

“Oh, you’re up again!” she said, rushing over to us. “We were getting worried!”

After sitting me down in the lounge, Alison explained, texting everyone the good news as she did so. I’d grabbed Annie as soon as she’d stabbed Pobo, which had thankfully gotten her out of the way. So when the salt circle broke, he’d been unable to touch her, instead reaching his malicious arm out to me, and _into me_. With one hand inside my body, he’d tried to pull me to him, but before he could get me, he had disintegrated, the way spirits tend to do when you burn the body or whatever else. That’s why I’d fallen to the ground.

Apparently, I’d thrown up and passed out. Tonya had given me a frantic exam, and found that my temperature was on the low side, and my pulse a bit weak. But my heart-rate was okay and I didn’t have bone or tissue injuries. There’d been some discussion of getting me to hospital, but then my temperature went back up and I woke. I didn’t remember waking at all, but Alison said I’d been weak and slurring, like I was tired, but I seemed to understand what was happening, and I managed to pass Tonya’s concussion exam. I’d even been able to get my gross clothes off and into bed with a little help from Tonya.

I’d been in and out of consciousness for two days, during which Tonya, Tas and Matthew had gone back to work, while the boys dropped in and out of the house repeatedly. They’d been worried how long I slept, but according to Tonya it was all normal sleep and no cause for alarm. She suspected I was just completely drained. But she’d given me until the evening, or she was taking me to hospital. I’d avoided her deadline by about six hours.

Sam had done some more research into the _Iratus_ , and found some speculation that they could possess a human. His theory, Alison explained, struggling some with the unfamiliar concepts, was that Pobo had been trying to possess me, and maybe got part of the way through the process, before Annie’s attack had killed him once and for all.

Once Alison had me sitting down, Annie brought Miss Lulu and Miss Muffet and climbed up onto my lap. Her aunt apologised, but I didn’t mind at all. I still felt terrible for what the kid had been through and the fact she still wanted to befriend me cheered me up immensely.

“Pobo didn’t come back,” she told me. “Sam and Dean said-ed he’s gone now.”

“That’s right,” I told her, taking Miss Muffet as she was offered to me. “You got rid of him!”

After she’d filled me in with the details, Matthew called and Alison was still on the phone with him when the doorbell rang. Still talking, she hurried to open the door. She let Sam and Dean in, gave them a wave, and then took the phone back into the kitchen.

When she saw them, Annie got down off my lap and went over to the boys. She didn’t hug them, the way she had with me, and she kept her distance a little. But she definitely wasn’t as scared of them as she had been. She had a big smile for them as she pointed.

“Ellie woked up,” she said.

Before I was even halfway to my feet, Sam had already grabbed me in a hug. He lifted me off the ground and I couldn’t help giggling at his enthusiasm.

“Thank God,” he said.

Dean came in for a much more casual hug. It was strong and tight, and it was certainly enthusiastic, but not so… exuberant, I suppose is the word. Much cooler.

“Glad you’re back, Princess,” said Dean, letting me go.

I was feeling a bit drained already, and sat myself back down. “So, did my Dad tear you a new…” I realised Annie was watching and listening to my every word. “…posterior.”

Sam shook his head as he sat down beside me. “Actually, no. Tonya was the one who talked to him first, and when she said it was probably just exhaustion, he was satisfied with that.”

My Dad trusted Tonya. She’d once called him for help, from a party we weren’t supposed to be at. I was sixteen and she was seventeen, and I’d said I was sleeping over her place while her mom was away. Then we went to this party instead, and I got drink spiked or something. I passed out, and Tonya got real scared and called Dad. He was mad at us both, but he was impressed that Tonya had called him. She’d put my safety first, even though she knew it’d get us both into trouble. Now she was a doctor and everything, so I could believe Dad trusted her judgement.

“Is he mad at me?” I asked.

Dean shook his head, sitting himself down on my other side. “Nope. Impressed, actually. He liked the part where you grabbed the munchkin here and threw her to safety. You could hear the proud fatherly tears.”

“You could not!” I laughed, elbowing him lightly. “Alison says I was possessed or something?”

“You weren’t,” Sam said, with great conviction. I knew he’d done all the research he could, probably staying up late til he passed out too. “I think he just started that process. You know, tried to catch a ride before he crumbled… But he wasn’t quick enough, or you were too quick, or something.”

With the boys sitting so close to me, Annie was looking at us carefully. I realised Sam was sitting on her dolls, and ordered him to stand up and hand them over immediately.

“Sorry,” he said, as Annie quickly took them from him and stepped back. “I squashed them.”

“‘sokay,” she squeaked. “They din’t die.”

Sam sighed dramatically. “Phew! I’m glad they’re okay.”

I don’t know though. If you’ve gotta die, that’d be the way to go out, right? Pressed against Sam Winchester’s ass.

* * *

 

We stayed with Tonya another few days, just to be sure I was alright. She wasn’t comfortable letting me leave until she was absolutely sure. Dean got increasingly antsy. He just liked being on the road, and staying in one place wasn’t really his thing. He didn’t even like staying at Dad’s place more than a couple days. On top of that, it was getting close to the end of February. There was a very famous haunted house up north that the boys had made plans to tackle. The alleged ghost only appeared on February 29th, so there wouldn’t be another opportunity for four years.

I was more than ready to leave. As much as I loved Tonya, four people in one apartment was getting a bit much. And besides, I had signed on with the boys because I wanted to see the country, and to hunt.

But Alison and Matthew were that cool kind of posh people. They lived in a fancy house with a foyer and pure white carpets, which made me a little uncomfortable. But they were friendly, and cool, and not snobby at all. They were dinner party people, sure. But they were the kind of dinner party people who would invite the likes of me and the boys to their home. They asked us all to come, just to say thankyou and so Annie could say goodbye.

Dean was dead set against it. He flatly refused to go. Until I told him the part about Annie wanting to say goodbye to him. Then, sucker, he gave a pretend shrug of irritation and said “Fine, if it’ll make the munchkin happy”.

So that’s how it happened, me in a fancy house, a Winchester on either side, eating food at a proper dining table with a white tablecloth and a flower centrepiece and all. I even made the boys smile and pose for a photo, so I could send it to Jo. She was never going to believe I’d got them dressed smart casual when they weren’t even working a job!

Tonya and Nastasja were both there, of course. It was the six of us adults, and Annie too. She sat next to Matthew and behaved herself very well. She was excited to be like a grown up and get to sit at the table and eat off the fancy blue occasion plates. Matthew had to cut her fish up for her, because of her arm. But she assured us all that she did know how to cut her food, honest.

She was even allowed to stay for dessert. Thanks to a tip-off from an unnamed source, Matthew produced a homemade apple pie. I’d figured Dean deserved some reward for coming with us, even though it was a little outside his comfort zone. Not to say that Dean’s a slob or whatever. He was actually as neat as you’d expect a man to be when he’d spent his whole life ready to pack up and leave a motel on a moment’s notice. But he was a diner food sort of guy, and though he never said so, I knew there was a part of him that felt judged and inferior.

He seemed to relax more the further we got into dinner. This was not entirely unaided by beer, both the drinking of it, and the discovery that Matthew shared most of his opinions about it. Anyhow, by the time the apple pie came out, he was very comfortable with the whole situation.

Annie finished her little piece of pie and then Alison took her upstairs to change for bed. They came back down, Annie in her cute little pig pyjamas and carrying Miss Muffet with her. Alison had a folded piece of paper. We were all sitting on the couches then, waiting for the official goodbye.

Dean went first. He stayed where he sat, and Annie came up close to him. She looked at him a moment and then darted forward. She did her best to hug his leg, and then quickly backed up again. There’d been a brief half second of physical contact there.

Sam was sitting next to his brother, so it wasn’t hard for the little girl to quickly hug his leg as well. Then she took a step back, standing at a distance she felt safe.

“Thanks Sam and Dean.”

“You’re welcome, kid,” Dean said.

Annie reached towards her aunt, who handed her the piece of paper.

“I made-ed you a card,” Annie said, holding it out to Sam.

I got up from my own seat immediately, so I could stand behind the boys and read their card for myself. Sam held it so Dean could see too. On the front, Annie had drawn a cute picture of them. She’d drawn Sam ludicrously tall, with a big crookedly drawn smile. Dean looked much too short in comparison, and Annie seemed to have taken very special care drawing on spiky yellow hair. Down the bottom, she had written their names, too. Sam she got right, while she’d put DEEN, which is a completely understandable error.

Inside, she had written in big letters, a few of them backwards and with a couple of crossings out: _THeNK yOU SAM AN DeeN yOU AR FUNy AN NISe._

I was almost overcome by how cute it was. I always was a sucker for a little kid, but Sam and Dean crissed-crossed the country saving people from monsters every day and to see them thanked, so genuinely, by such a little girl was very satisfying. And she must have done it all by herself, because there was no spelling correction. She’d just made it herself, because she wanted to. It hit me on two levels: my fondness for kids, and my conviction that my favourite guys deserved more love and gratitude than they would ever get.

“Thanks, short stuff,” Dean said, once he’d read the inside. He took the card from Sam and showed him the front again. “Check it out, Sammy, she got your mouth just right!”

Sam smiled, and it was not crooked one bit. It was warmth, and dimples, and sunlight. “Thankyou Annie, this is really nice of you.”

I was about to come around to say goodbye myself, but before I had the chance, Annie ran around the couch to me. Even with one arm broken and Miss Muffet held in the other hand, she still managed to wrap herself all the way around my legs. She stayed there for at least a minute before I figured I’d better peel her off so Alison could get her to bed.

As soon as I started to lightly nudge her away, she held her arms out and I knew she wanted me to pick her up. She wasn’t exactly a toddler, but she was small for her age and I had more than enough strength to grab her around the middle and lift her up. She hugged onto my torso then, before ducking her head to whisper into my ear.

“Ellie you’re my favourite.”

Honestly, what could I do other than hug the sweet little thing tighter?

“Annie, it’s time for bed, Sweetie. Say bye to Ellie now.”

She detached herself and I put her down on the ground.

“Thanks for saving me, Ellie.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Bye bye, we’ll miss you.”

Then she was holding out Miss Muffet to me.

“Bye bye Miss Muffet.”

Annie shook her head and thrust her doll at me again. Confused, I looked at Matthew for a queue.

“She wants you to take Muffet with you,” said Matthew.

Oh God, I couldn’t! Her mother had made her that doll! She’d never make her another one, poor lady. At five years old, she maybe thought giving me one was the right thing to do, but she’d regret it when she was older.

“Mama said Muffet and Lulu can keep me safe,” said Annie. “But I don’ needs both. Muffet will keep you safe too, Ellie.”

Simultaneously honored and horrified, I looked to Matthew again. He mouthed to me _“Take it”_.

So, I reached down and took Miss Muffet from her rightful owner. It wouldn’t hurt to take her for a little while. Alison and Matthew had my email address, and Tonya and Tas both had numbers for me and the guys. When Annie started to fret, one of them could just let me know and I’d mail it back.

Suddenly a cute idea formed in my head. Maybe Miss Muffet could email Annie a photo or two, some snapshots of her adventures through America. I’d have exploded with excitement at that age.

Before Annie left with her aunt, I made sure Miss Muffet gave her a kiss on the cheek and said goodbye.

As they went upstairs, I sat down next to Matthew, looking at the dolly in my hands. I absently smoothed her little dress down.

“As soon as she wants it back, let me know,” I said. “I’ll send her registered mail.”

Matthew smiled. “Thanks. She’s been freaking out, saying she’s scared one of the monsters will get you. When my sister packed up Annie to go to the shelter, she asked if she could bring her dolls. Jenny told her she should, because they were guardian angels. She kinda… I guess she was afraid of the worst, you know? Anyway, it’s better if you take it for a while. It’ll make her feel like her new friends are safe.”

God, poor Jenny. I couldn’t imagine being in that much fear. If it made Annie feel better to take Miss Muffet than okay. She couldn’t protect me, but she could remind me why I loved hunting so much.

And that not all monsters were supernatural ones.

* * *

 

Tonya and I had one last little sleepover.

“So, now you’ve met my boys, what do you _really_ think?” I asked.

She smiled. “I like them. I think I scared Dean a bit, but…”

“ _Scared_ _Dean_? How?”

She definitely had rejected any attempt to hit on her, but I didn’t see Tonya threatening him or anything. She’d have just laughed.

She laughed now, leaning back against the bed frame. But she didn’t give any answer. Dean sure as hell wouldn’t, so I’d have to resign myself to never knowing what she meant.

“He seems like a good guy, though. And he obviously cares a lot about you and your safety, so he’s alright by me.”

“And Sam?” I asked.

There was something in her sigh that suggested she had thought long and hard about that. “He’s an interesting one. Dean makes sense to me, you know? I get where he’s coming from. Sam is… definitely a nice guy, no question. But I think there’s a lot under the surface with him, and I’d love to know what it is.”

I’d always thought of Sam as much more straightforward, while Dean hid a lot of himself under layers of sarcasm and sex. I told Tonya so.

“Oh, Dean’s complicated, definitely. But, he’s the kind of complicated I’ve seen before, you know? Sam is more interesting to me, but you know him better, so maybe you’re seeing what I can’t.”

“Maybe,” I said.

That made some sense. Maybe I just saw through all Sam’s layers and so he seemed uncomplex to me.

“I wish Miss Muffet _was_ a guardian angel,” she said, suddenly changing the subject. “Now I know you’re not just randomly cruising America with two hotties, I’m gonna be worrying about you all the time.”

“Write me,” I said. “Call me. I’ll update you on what the hotties are up to.”

“You better,” she said. “I expect a text the minute you’re naked with one of them.”

“Never gonna happen,” I assured her. “It’d just get weird.”

She grabbed me into a one armed hug, putting her head on my shoulder. “Course it would. Never change, hun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's time for something I know a lot of folks have been looking forward too: Ghostfacers!!!
> 
> But before that happens, my wonderful Story Consultant would like to see some private conversations between Tonya and the Winchesters. So I'll be posting a Special Chapter on my Tumblr: winchestersplusone.tumblr.com
> 
> It'll be there within a few days, I think. :)


	82. Chapter 82: Haunted House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s this house that is only haunted once every 4 years. But it looks like someone beat Ellie and the boys to the punch.

“I’m just sayin’, if you’re gonna be a haunted house, why you gotta live the clichѐ, you know?”

Dean groaned. “Tell me we’re not back on this…”

But I was passionate about the subject, and would not be silenced. “Take some pride in your appearance, House.”

“You got a point,” said Sam, reaching into the trunk for his rifle. “A nice brick suburban place, with a lawn and garden gnomes is a much better disguise. Gonna lure in a lot more people to haunt that way.”

“Thankyou, Sam. Ain’t no one going in there unless they’re hunters or horny teens in a shitty horror movie.”

“Then who the hell is that?” asked Dean.

Sam straightened up to look where his brother pointed, and I managed to peep through the small space between them.

There was a van. Parked right outside the house, too. We’d parked about a hundred metres from the door, because you don’t want to risk getting too close to whatever barrier the spirits in the house are bound by. You leave your ride by the door, it’s possible something could get in and, depending on what sort of spirit it is, you could end up taking it with you during a hasty getaway.

Whoever owned the van apparently did not know that.

“Horny teens?” asked Sam, going back into the trunk for more shells.

Dean and I were still peering at the house. “Is that the Mystery Machine?” I grabbed onto Dean’s shoulder. “Omigod, are we gonna meet Scooby Doo?”

Normally he would have pushed me off, but I’d hit him where he lived. “Huh. Daphne,” he said, and I could hear his smirk, though it was too dark to see him properly.

“Whoever they are, we gotta get ‘em out,” said Sam, handing me a torch. “Police raid?”

“Yep,” Dean said, forgetting about Daphne. “Dumb kids, they’ll probably just run.”

“We should get a siren,” I said, reaching into the trunk for my gun. I hated using it, but the boys often insisted on me carrying, with a few rounds of whatever was appropriate. I guess they had a point. Silver knives don’t work on everything.

I was about to stuff it in my waistband when Dean stopped me. “Nah, go in hot. We’ll take the torches and if they don’t run, you can fire a warning shot, freak these kids out.”

Okay, look. I know it’s not cool to deliberately terrify teenagers, but if they were in that house come Midnight, they would die. Plenty had tried it before, and every one had disappeared. No bodies ever found. That’d be a whole lot more traumatising than me causing reckless damage to a couple of walls.

Sam got everything into the duffle and hauled it out of the trunk like it weighed nothing. He had to adjust his grip a little to carry the bag and use his torch, but he was good to go in a moment.

We did a quick check through the windows of the van, but there didn’t seem to be anyone in there. Why make out in a van when you got a whole abandoned, boarded up house, right?

“Who takes a girl to a haunted house anyway?” I asked, as we approached the front door. “Kids these days, ain’t even heard of dinner and a movie.”

“Guys took you to dinner?” asked Dean, trying to peer through the boards over a window, while he shone his torch in. “ _ And _ a movie? What kind of cashed-up Casanovas were you dating?”

I gestured to the boys to get on either side of me as I lined myself up in front of the door. “Okay, they took me to half price Monday at the crappiest cinema in town and then we’d do it in whatever POS car he drove.” I sighed. “But it still beat a haunted house. This dump is about as romantic as the dead rats that probably live here.”

Launching a carefully controlled kick at the door, I let it swing open, and Sam’s flashlight lit up the room inside. As I raised my gun, I got a glimpse of wooden floorboards and graffiti over peeling wallpaper. No one was there.

“Wasted a perfectly good scary door kick,” I whined, as Sam and Dean followed me into the house, flashing their torches around the room.

“Aw Princess, I was impressed.”

“What the hell?” asked Sam.

He had wandered into the middle of the room, where an old wooden table was set up with a bunch of laptops.

“What’re they doing?” I asked.

After staring a little longer, Sam looked up. “I think they’re hooked up to cameras.”

Weird. Maybe local kids thought it’d be fun to try and catch a ghost on film. That definitely sounded more interesting than having sex in a condemned building. Maybe this was a bunch of kids, rather than just a couple. Might be harder to round them up and chase them out.

Whatever was in the place only came once every four years. It was eleven pm on February 28th, did these kids have to pick  _ now _ ?

It wasn’t exactly a scream. It as more a sort of extended session of hysterical shouting. Hard to say how many or what age or gender, because they were shouting over the top of one another. Good. That meant they were already nice and scared. It was coming from above us, one of the other floors.

“Come on,” I said, getting a foot on the bottom stair. A real cop would have gone up gun ready, but no matter how good I was, I didn’t want to risk startling or a muscle spasm and hit some kid with a salt round. It was better than a bullet, but I preferred not to shoot children.

The shouting had died down, and I could hear a low voice at the top of the stairs. Not a whisper, just an ordinary speaking tone, maybe a little dampened by the eerie atmosphere of the house.

“Oh God. Okay it was just… I think it was just this branch, okay? In the window.”

Reaching the top of the stairs, a Winchester on either side, I heard a reply, a male voice, with heavy breath behind it, maybe from all the panicking and yelling.

“This is spooky, man.”

And then I saw one of them in the torchlight.

“Freeze! Police Officers!” I shouted.

“Don’t move!” Dean added.

There were two guys, and in the haze of our lights combined with theirs, it was a little tough to make them out properly. One of them might have been a teenager, but the other was definitely a grown adult. Maybe my age, maybe a tiny bit older. They were both clearly panicked, hands in the air. The younger guy was in military fatigues that didn’t really fit, with some strange apparatus strapped to him. The head flashlight made sense, but there was other stuff too. Maybe that thing on his shoulder was a little camera?

“All right, all right, all right,” Sam said, his voice less menacing than mine. “Take it easy, take it easy.”

When we did the scary cops bit, I was normally Good Cop. I based my cop persona on my friend Jody. She was Sheriff back home, and when she busted kids, she Wasn’t Angry, Just Disappointed. She was sort of a Mom Cop. Dean liked to play Bad Cop, jaded by years on the force, and forever angry about Punk Kids. Sam usually went with something in between. He liked to mix it up a little. My favourite was Hippy Cop, where he just wanted Dean and I to calm down and cut these nice kids a break.

But since I was pointing a gun at them, Sam had taken on my Good Cop role. Good Cop, maybe, but still stern and willing to Arrest Your Punk Ass.

“You kids got identification?” I asked, even though one of them was clearly not a kid.

“Come on,” Sam reached out with his free hand. “Let’s see some ID.”

The younger guy was immediately reaching into his pocket while the other seemed to be looking very carefully at our faces. I aimed my gun at him, in case he was questioning our cover. It’s harder to think rationally about whether someone is a cop or not, if they have a gun trained on your face.

“Why? Are… Are we under arrest?” asked the young one, handing his ID over to Dean’s waiting hand.

“We’re unarmed,” said his friend.

“Well we ain’t, so let’s see some ID,” I said.

“Oh God, oh God.” Whoever Junior was, he sure wasn’t cool in a crisis. I would not have been shocked if he’d peed his ill-fitting camo pants then and there.

Dean looked at the ID. “Want to explain that weird outfit, Mister… uh… Corbett?”

But it was the other guy that answered. “I know you.”

“Yeah, sure you do,” said Dean, holding out a hand. “Gimme some identification.”

But the bearded guy was stepping back, flashing his own torch direct into our faces. It was tricky to see with the light in my eyes, so I hoped it didn’t come to me needing a warning shot. That could go wrong real easy.

“Yeah… Whoa, hold on a second. Not the lady, but I know both you guys. Yeah.”

“What?” asked his young friend, while I looked to my left, at Sam’s confused face.

“Yeah,” said Beard. “Huh…”

“Holy shit,” said Sam.

I lowered the gun. This had clearly turned into a different sort of situation, and it didn’t seem like I’d get to freak any teens out after all. Not that I enjoyed it, obviously. It was just the lesser of two evils, sometimes. And you may as well love your work, right?

“Fuck,” said Dean.

I looked from Sam to Dean and then back again.

“What?”

“Uh, West Texas, couple years back. You’ve heard the story, with the Tulpa. Those two goofballs that almost got us killed.”

“The hellhounds or something?” Dean said, lowering his torch and grimacing.

I remembered. It had been one of the stories Sam told me after their father died. They’d been at our place, Dean fixing the Impala, and Sam and I had a lot of catching up to do. We played “Did you ever gank a…” and I was sure I was onto a winner, cos I’d helped Dad with a Tulpa one time. Sam told me about this Tulpa that was caused by some local kids starting up a hoax. These two ghost groupie nerd guys kept making things worse by talking about it on their blog. So the boys lied to them about how to kill the darn thing, hoping they’d publish it and absorb it into the myth. It had worked, thankfully.

“Yeah, we’re not hellhounds anymore,” the bearded guy said. “It didn’t test that well.”

“Ed, what’s going on?” asked his friend, who apparently did  _ not _ remember Sam and Dean. Odd, because they were pretty memorable, really.

“They’re not cops, buddy. No, not at all.”

Dean stepped forward. “Ed. Ed, you had a partner too, didn’t you? A different guy?”

Well, that explained why the younger one didn’t recognise the Winchesters.

“Oh yeah. Yeah,” said Ed.

“Is he around here somewhere?”

“He’s running around, chasing ghosts.” Ed said this as though it were intended to be the most impressive thing we had ever heard or ever would hear, in the rest of our dull, pointless lives.

Please. Between the three of us, we could finish off ten Poltergeists before breakfast.

“Okay, well listen. You and Rambo need to get your girlfriends and get out of here.”

Ed chuckled, and I swear to God, he actually swaggered like he had a hope in hell of intimidating a Winchester or two.

“All right. Listen here, Chisel Chest, okay…” Oh my God, Chisel Chest! I started to giggle at the absurdity, yet accuracy, of the attempted insult. “We were here first. We’ve already set up base camp. We beat you.”

Dean turned to look at me, and I was shaking with giggles, biting my lip as I tried not to let it show. “You hear that, Ellie? They were here first.”

I managed to keep it together and get words out. “Already set up base camp,” I repeated.

“Mm hmm.” Ed sounded so smug.

Dean chuckled, in a deliberate, menacing way, that was completely opposite to my uncontrollable giggle. Then he grabbed Ed by the collar and pushed him right into the wall. Even once he’d stopped pretending to be police, Dean was still Bad Cop.

“Oh God,” Ed muttered, finally understanding his situation.

“Ed?” Dean growled. That low deep, almost animal sound to his voice. So freakin’ hot. I didn’t need that. Not when I was already crossing the border into Giggletown.

“Yeah?” Ed’s voice was the opposite of Dean’s: high and meek and not remotely sexy.

“Where’s your partner?”

“U… upstairs?” I wasn’t sure if it was a question, or just said so apologetically and fearfully that it came out sounding like one.

“Okay,” Dean ordered. When he was angry and on a mission, he took on a very commanding tone. It kinda made me wish he’d command me some more.

What? The dude was gorgeous and I don’t mind experimentation and anyway a girl can speculate don’t judge me.

“Ellie, you take Tweedledee and his friend back to pack up their stuff. Sam…”

Sam groaned, as he handed me the duffle he was carrying. “Let’s go get Tweedledum.”

All Sam had to do was walk forward and those two guys were squashing themselves against the wall to get out of his way. They were avoiding him like he was radioactive.

When I heard Sam and Dean’s heavy boots on the stairs, I beckoned to the two guys I was now apparently babysitting. But I gestured with the gun still in my hand, using it to point the way to the door and the staircase back down.

“Okay, boys, playtime’s over, let’s get you packed up before your mommy comes for you.”

The younger guy started to move, while Ed came close and looked at me.

“Who  _ are  _ you?”

“I’m the chick with the gun, telling you to get your ass downstairs before I decide to drag you.”

“Are you their sister?” Ed asked, though he did start to move towards the stairs.

“Why would you think that? We don't exactly look alike.”

He shrugged as he started to make his way down. His friend had gone on ahead. “You talk like the short one.”

Did I? No… I just used some of the same language cos that what hunters do. Plus we'd grown up together and our dads knew each other and that's just how language passes from person to person.

“Just because we share a similar vernacular, doesn't mean we're related,” I told him. “Most words and expressions begin by spreading among communities based on shared environment and the need for language that relates to that environment. Like socioeconomic status, location or career.”

“O… Okay…”

“Also Dean is over six foot. If there's a  _ short one _ , it's definitely me.”

The younger guy was waiting in the main living area downstairs. He was just standing at the bottom of the stairs, obviously waiting on instructions from Ed.

I passed him and headed over to the desk, where I dumped the duffle down next to the laptops. Ed didn’t seem to have any intention of leaving, and if he knew we weren’t cops, I’d have to find some other way to persuade him.

Rifling through the duffle, I looked for the background info Sam had printed out. He always did that, even when it was a case like this, where we all knew all the facts. I’d suggested once that he make a scrapbook, decorate it with some cute stickers. I even offered to draw some werewolves and scary ghosts. He had rolled his eyes at me while throwing his latest completed case files into the bin. 

Getting hold of the papers, I pulled them out and waved them at Ed.

“What are you guys thinking? You know about this place, don’t you?”

“We’re here to spend the night, okay? It’s for our TV show.”

TV show? For chrissakes. “Oh wow. That’s the least stupid idea ever,” I said, with an extra dramatic eye roll.

“Nobody’s ever spent the night before,” said the young guy. What had Dean said his name was? He sure had a lot of enthusiasm.

“Uh… yeah they have!”

“We’ve never heard of them,” said Ed. I’d never had a real brother, but if I had, our arguments would have sounded just like this one.

“You know why you never heard of them? Cos they never came out again.”

Ed snorted, and his friend obediently did the same.

“Oh, you don’t believe me, dumbass?” I thrusted the research pages at him one at a time as I went. “Look, Ed! Missing Persons reports, going back fifty years! Uncovered by five whole minutes of research! It’s John Graham, stayed on a dare… and gone. Julie Wilkerson… also gone. Tons and tons more! 1964! 1968! 72! 80! 88!” By now, I was just throwing pages up into the air, hoping the strength of my irritation would be sufficient. “They all came to stay the night, on a leap year and  _ they’re all gone _ , kids!”

Ed was trying to read some of the pages I’d stuffed into his hands, while his friend was collecting them from where they’d fallen to the floor. I threw the last one at him, a summary of the autopsy of the house’s last owner. His had been the only body ever found there.

“These look legit…” Ed murmured, looking at the missing person posters.

My frustration eased, as I realised maybe he was going to take me seriously. If he looked at the evidence and rethought his dangerous TV show plans, I’d happily kiss him on the mouth and send him and his friends off with a prize hamper.

“They are,” I said. “But you’ve got time to get out. You and your friends should…”

Before I could finish the sentence, I was interrupted by a garble of shouting from the staircase. I couldn’t tell how many there were, but one of them kept screaming “Oh my God, oh my God”. Not in a scared way, though. More excited.

“We saw one!” he exclaimed to his friends.

A man and a woman were clattering down the stairs behind him, just as excited. Behind them was Sam, who immediately sought me out and passed a frustrated expression in my direction, eyebrows up, head tilting. Dean was last, still holding his gun, and looking like he wished he could shoot something. Anything.

“Get outta here!” Ed cheered, immediately forgetting all the convincing evidence I’d just shown him.

“It was amazing!” the woman yelled. She raised an eyebrow at seeing me, but turned her attention back to the others.

The first guy had finally stopped shouting with excitement. He looked at me and gestured at me with his head.

“Who’s she?” he asked Ed.

“Some friend of those assholes from Texas.”

This new guy was shorter than Ed, and clean shaven. He had darker hair and was outfitted basically the same as the others. I guess the TV show thing explained all the cameras they were wearing. The woman had them too.

Then there was the other guy, who was carrying the normal kind of video camera, filming the conversation.

“Look at this,” the woman was saying.

She was pretty, and had a sort of confidence to her that the guys didn’t have. Ed seemed to have confidence, but it was a different kind. He was sure about what he was doing, with the whole TV thing. But the woman moved like someone who was confident about  _ herself _ . She’d been on one of the laptops, setting up a video to show her friends, and I wasn’t gonna pretend like I didn’t want to see it too.

“Honest to God proof!” she said, as we all crowded behind her.

The footage was in black and white, and looked like it had been taken by a camera up high on the wall. Sam and Dean weren’t there, just the three amateurs, milling about in a dark room, torches shining. Then there was a cut to a different camera and she wasn’t kidding.

There he was, a guy in an old-fashioned, but pricey looking suit. He had a hat too, like one of those old-timey gangsters. He just stood there as the group approached him.

“What kind of reading did we get?” the guy with the camera asked.

“Uh… it was a 10.9.”

That was an EMF reading, for sure. A 10.9 was a decisive reading alright, but why even have one? It was obviously a spirit. I could tell by looking at it. It was transparent.

As we watched, accompanied by commentary from the short guy, the gangster-type reacted, moving backwards, as though something had hit his chest with force. Before he could fall, he disappeared, fritzing out of view like a television with bad reception.

It was a death echo. I’d seen plenty of those. It stopped where it did because by that point, the guy was dead, so it was only his corpse that had originally fallen. It seemed like maybe he’d been shot. That would explain the push backwards, and he  _ did  _ look like a mobster.

Dean grabbed my arm and pulled me with him over into a corner. Sam followed.

“Think we were off on this?” Sam asked. “I mean… that was just a death echo.”

Dean frowned. “Yeah, but what’s it doing here? Did anybody get shot here?”

Sam and I shared a look. “Not that we found,” I answered.

“What’s a death echo?”

We all turned to find the guy with the video camera was filming us. Dean rolled his eyes as Sam answered.

“Look, we got a problem here. That ghost ain’t it…”

“What’s a death echo?” he asked again.

“They’re trapped,” I told him. “Like in a constant loop. They play their death over and over, usually in the same place they got ganked. They’re not dangerous.”

I turned back to the boys. Sam tried to keep his voice down, probably hoping the camera wouldn’t pick him up. “So maybe the echo’s not dangerous, but something here is.”

“You’re right,” Dean agreed. He raised his voice, camera or not. “Alright, we need to get out of here, guys! Come on, let’s go, let’s go. Let’s go, pack it up.”

“Guys, time is running out!” I called, noticing they didn’t seem to be moving at all.

Finally, someone acknowledged us. “What about all of our equipment?” the woman asked me. “What are we gonna do with it?”

There was more yelling and talking over one another. I wondered if they knew all that confusion and shouting wouldn’t make for very good TV.

Dean and Sam were still trying to herd the cattle out of the living room. The woman was gesturing to the equipment, Ed and his short friend were babbling at each other, and the curly headed cameraman was still filming the lot.

Hang on…

“Where’s the other guy?” I hollered. “Where’d he go?!”

My shrieky voice might have been irritating to Dean, but it sure was handy for bringing silence to a chaotic room. All four of the remaining ghost hunters looked around the room, as did my boys.

“Ah shit,” Dean sighed.

“Corbett!” called Ed. At least I knew what the missing guy’s name was now. Not that it would help much. “Corbett!”

Since I was closest to the stairs, I ran over to yell up to the next floor. “Corbett!?”

The others were still yelling. Sam had the front door open and Corbett’s friends were going for internal doors. Except Ed, he just stood in place, shouting.

I got my foot up onto the first step, as I called up. “Corbett?! You gotta come down, it’s dangero…”

And then, from above, there was a loud, piercing scream that turned my blood so cold I nearly fell down right where I was standing.


	83. Chapter 82: On Film

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corbett has disappeared somewhere in the creepy haunted house. And then things just kinda get worse from there.

“That was Corbett!” screamed Ed.

His friends yelled as well, and personally, I thought it was to their credit that they all ran for the stairs. Dean was annoyed by it, and so was Sam, a little. But from what I’d heard about them, these people had never actually encountered a real ghost before, and they ran towards their screaming friend.

Annoying or not, I figured that made them good people.

Ed, his shorter friend and the woman all started running upstairs, closely followed by the guy with the camera.

“We’ll get him!” Dean called. “Go back!”

But the three of us were left standing alone downstairs, while the screams carried on at least one floor above. The clattering on the stairs and the shouting were not enough to drown out the screaming.

“Fuck,” said Sam.

“There’s something worse than death echoes here,” I said, as I started to run up the stairs after them. I could hear the boys behind me.

The screaming from the young guy, Corbett, was mostly indistinct, but as I arrived on the first floor, I distinctly heard him screaming “Let me go!” Something had that kid, and it was _not_ some death echo.

By the time we reached the ghostbuster wannabes, I could no longer hear Corbett’s screams, and that was not good.

“He’s not here,” I told them, trying to take Ed’s arm and direct him back towards the stairs. We needed to get them all out before whatever grabbed Corbett came back for more.

There were four of them and only three of us, and they resisted our attempts to take them away from where they’d last heard their friend’s voice. But we got them down the stairs and back into their “basecamp” on the first floor.

They all ran towards their computers, but I didn’t get a chance to find out why, because I could already hear more trouble brewing. And it was the kind of trouble I couldn’t fix with salt and flames.

“Well, it’s 12:04 Dean. You good, you happy?”

The boys had stopped by the front door, at the bottom of the staircase, and Sam’s tone was somewhere between furious and terrified.

“Yeah, I am happy,” Dean replied, and _his_ tone was best described as “confrontational”.

And when there’s a Winchester confrontation, guess who they expect to take sides?

“ _Let’s go hunt the Morton house_ you said! It’s our grand canyon.”

“Sam, I don’t wanna hear this…”

Sam did not often interrupt his brother, and when he did, it was because he was a level of pissed off that was, frankly, a bit scary.

And a bit hot.

Don’t judge me.

“You got two months left, Dean,” Sam cut in, picking up a crappy old wooden chair. “Instead, we’re gonna die tonight.”

As he spoke, he swung the chair at the door (no effort at all, by the way) and it hit, breaking into pieces but without making a dent on the door.

I realised the handheld camera guy had been filming us, when he spoke. “Whoa! What the hell is going on, guys?”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” said Sam, his aggressive hackles still up, “Every door, every window… I’m guessing every exit out of this house. They’re all sealed!”

There was definitely an unspoken “ _and this is your dumb fault_ ” on the end of that sentence.

“But… why are they sealed?” asked the woman.

“It’s a supernatural lockdown,” I explained. “Whatever took your friend has locked us in here. It’s not the death echo. This is something nasty. Even for us, and we do this every day.”

I heard the sound of an EMF reader spiking, so I hurried over to where Ed was holding it. Everyone followed, which was a good thing, because then the EMF spiked again.

“Whoa! Whoa!” said Ed, an edge of hysteria in his voice, “Guys, the EMF is starting to spike, this is a big one.”

“Everybody stay close, there’s something coming,” Sam warned.

He didn’t mean it that literally, but the woman shifted closer to me and grabbed onto my hand. That happened a lot. People tended to get so scared they just wanted a reassuring physical connection to another human. And their first choice was either a loved one, or someone who seemed like they knew what was going on.

It was not usually me. Children tended to gravitate to me, but everyone else usually went for one of the Winchesters. They were pretty imposing, so I could see why someone would latch onto them for protection. It seemed like an odd choice, clinging to my hand.

“You okay?” I whispered to her.

She looked up at me and just managed to shake her head, but she was obviously too scared to speak. I didn’t blame her. I was a hunter full time, and I’d seen my first spirit at twelve. And I was freaked out. _Sam_ was freaked out. All four of these people were doing well not to faint.

And then he appeared, a man in a grubby trenchcoat, standing with his back to us, sorta hunched over a little.

“Is this the same echo you guys saw earlier?” Dean asked.

“No, it’s a different guy,” said the shortest guy. I found out later his name was Harry.

“Multiple echoes in one house? That’s pretty freakin’ weird,” I said, looking up to see both Sam and Dean nodding in agreement.

“Okay, all right all right all right,” said Dean, in what was probably intended to be a reassuring way, but kind of had an edge of panic to it, so it didn’t really soothe anybody.

“Hey, buddy!” he said, spinning his flashlight in his hand as he stepped forward. He moved around the death echo, to yell into its face. “Hey! Hey wake up! You’re dead! Hello!”

“What’s he doing?” Harry asked, watching. Then he looked at me and Sam and repeated himself. “What’s he doing?”

“It’s rare, but sometimes you can shock an echo out of its loop,” Sam explained.

“You can talk to the part that’s still human, make it see reality and move on peaceful-like,” I added.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “But usually you gotta have some kind of connection to the dead.”

“Come on!” Dean shouted. “Wake up!”

Still clearly unseen by the spirit, Dean turned around to shout to me. “Ellie, you try! You got that Disney Princess vibe going on!”

The woman, Maggie, let go of my hand as I stepped forward. I didn’t know exactly what Dean meant by Disney Princess, but I guessed he meant that I’m a people person. Maybe that could help me get through to the poor dead man, stuck in an eternal loop of his own demise.

I approached him more carefully, as clearly Dean’s aggression had not worked. Looking into his face, I saw a man in his 40s, with curly dark hair. He was about my Dad’s build, and it wasn’t really clear from his clothing when he’d died.

I bent my knees a little so I could look into his eyes. “You hear me, Sir? You know you died, don’t you? You know you’re dead? You wanna leave, right? You wanna move on, I know you do. Just…”

“What’s that sound?” asked one of the others.

I could hear it too, a strange rumbling. Like an engine maybe. The echo turned around, and as he did so, I could clearly see the bright light illuminating his chest and getting brighter.

A horn sounded and then the man suddenly flew backwards, a pool of red forming on his stomach, until he blinked out of existence, his loop completed once more.

 

* * *

 

 

With no kind of idea about what was happening, we decided it might be time to look through the rest of the house and see if there might be any clues.

Dean took charge pretty naturally, and still with nothing to show for our search, he and Sam discussed the situation as they led us through rooms on the second floor. I listened with one ear as I herded the four remaining Ghostfacers (ridiculous name, but kinda cute!) ahead of me. We needed to stick together for safety, so I took up rear.

As we passed through into another room, Maggie slowed her steps slightly to come level with me.

“So… those echoes? Did they take Corbett?”

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “But we don’t really know. I’ve never heard of them doing that before.”

“Do you do this a lot?” she asked.

“Yeah. I get the impression this is the first time you guys have been near real ghosts…”

She nodded, moving her handheld camera slightly. I realised she was filming me. Without actually asking my permission, which was pretty rude, but she was cute as heck, so I gave her a pass.

“Ed and Harry saw that thing one time, the… ghost thing. When they met your boyfriend and his brother.”

I laughed. “He’s not my boyfriend.” Then I stopped moving for a minute as I realised what she’d said. “Wait… which one did you think was my boyfriend?”

Maggie smiled. “I didn’t… I mean, I guess I just assumed one of them is. Sorry.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’m flattered you think I could bag a dude that hot.”

She laughed now, as we walked side by side, her camera pointed at me, but far enough away that it wasn’t too intrusive. “You totally could,” she said, all casual, like it was obvious.

I blushed, and not at the thought of Sam or Dean being my boyfriend. And even though it was hugely inappropriate, I had to ask. “So… is one of these guys your…”

“No,” she said, before I could even finish my question.

I was experiencing a lot of thoughts and emotions at once. Was I correctly interpreting that conversation? What kind of jerk was I, to be in that headspace, when we were looking for Maggie’s poor friend? I was pretty sure he was dead, which made me sad and angry, as well as determined to gank whatever had killed him.

Up ahead, I could hear Sam explaining to the others, and Maggie turned her camera on him as he did.

“... ghost, okay? Now ghosts, they usually haunt places where they lived or where they died.”

“Except these mooks didn’t live or die here,” Dean added.

“So… what are they doing here?” Maggie asked.

“That is the million dollar question,” I said. “Ain’t no record of anyone getting shot here. And no way that guy was hit by a train here.”

As I was speaking, we went through an open door, and I bumped into Ed’s back. He’d stopped suddenly and looking around, it was clear why. We were surrounded by animal heads. It was just like a creepy old cabin from one of those bad horror movies Dean liked to make me watch. No matter where the flashlights shone, on every wall, there were dead animals, decapitated and stuffed and mounted.

I always thought hunting and taxidermy was pretty gross. Dad used to take me hunting sometimes, the regular kind of hunting, but we always used to eat what we killed. We definitely didn’t stuff it and give it creepy glass eyes, so we could stick it on our walls.

Sam and Dean had already started looking through the furniture, so I joined in, and saw that Maggie did too, though she kept hold of her camera, filming as she went.

It was Sam that found something first. He held up a piece of paper, still sort of held in a broken frame. “Freeman Dagget. House’s last owner. Officially commended for twenty years of fine service at the Gamble General Hospital.”

“He was a doctor?” asked Dean.

Sam and I had done all the background research together. “Janitor,” I said.

Dean nodded, still looking through things. “This looks like his den. When’d you say he died? ‘64?”

“Yeah, heart attack,” Sam said.

Maggie was investigating a pile of boxes and tins, filming them as she did so. “What are these?” she asked. “C-rations?”

Dean and I came over for a look. “Yeah, army issued. Three squares.” There were boxes and boxes. “Like a lifetime supply.”

Maggie pulled a face that looked just like I felt. “God. Is that all he ate?”

“One stop shopping,” said Dean, moving on. “Hello… locked…”

He had come across one of those old fashioned metal lockers. An old lock wasn’t going to give Dean much trouble, and if it did, I could always have a go at picking it. But it was likely to be just a few aggressive bashes from popping open.

“Oh come on, guys,” complained Ed. “This is ridiculous. I mean, how the hell is this supposed to find Corbett, huh? We should be digging up the friggin’ floorboards right now.”

Sam nudged me as I passed him, to show me a pamphlet. It was covered in dust, but still readable. _Survival Under Atomic Attack_.

“Aw, our boy was an optimist!”

He smiled and went to put the pamphlet down, but both of us jumped as a loud bang came from the direction of Dean and his cabinet. I heard him chuckle in a triumphant sort of way.

We gathered around him, with the camera guy pushing me a little to get good footage as Dean brought out a box full of papers and sat it on a little table.

“Crap, crap, taxidermy…” he began, throwing stuff down. Then something got his attention, and he moved a little so the light from Ed’s torch could help him read whatever small thing he had in his hands. “Okay. He was a hospital janitor, right?”

“Yep. Twenty years.”

“Eeew. I got three toe tags.” He grabbed them out of the filing cabinet and placed them in my hand one at a time. “Death by gunshots. Train accident. Suicide.”

Have I ever mentioned that totally hot perfect unison thing the Winchesters sometimes did? Well… I don’t know how hot it was, but apparently, Sam and I were on one wavelength that night. Our voices were as one in the otherwise silent room.

“Ewwww!”

“What?” asked Harry. I’d almost forgotten that he and his cameraman friend were there. Maggie was getting involved in the search, while Ed was becoming frustrated that we made no progress looking for Corbett. I couldn’t blame him for that.

“Well, that explains why the death echoes are here,” Sam explained.

Harry and Ed still looked somewhat confused, and so did the cameraman.

“They’re here, because their bodies are here,” Sam continued, a little patronising, it has to be said. “Somewhere in the house.”

Dean did not have time to dance around the issue. “Daggett brought the remains home from the morgue. To play.”

Ed and Harry could apparently do the in-sync thing too.

“Eeew!”

“That’s nasty, dude,” said Cameraman.

I realised something, looking around. “Where’s Maggie?”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Ah, shit. What did we just…”

Hearing footsteps in the room across the hall, I hoped what I was hearing was Maggie and not the ghost of a creep who stole bodies from the morgue for… for whatever he used them for.

Flashlight in hand, I quickly went over, and to my immense relief, Maggie was right there, still with her flashlight and camera at the ready. Her breathing was very heavy, and she was clearly freaked out. But she’d kept looking for her friend anyway.

She might actually have made a pretty decent hunter with some training. She was a little jumpy, but brave. She seemed thorough too. Plus she was super fit. Woman had a great body.

I was about to speak and let her know I was there, when she turned around and jumped at the sight of me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just stick close, okay? I think we…”

I was interrupted by Ed’s mounting hysteria out in the hall. “Harry! Harry, I got an eight point six and climbing fast. Something huge is coming, look! Something big is coming!”

Harry had come into the room behind me, and now Ed came too, calling out with great animation. It was an odd tone, sort of excited, but fearful at the same time. I guess I could get that. I was scared of werewolves, but I still loved the hunt.

Sam, Dean and the camera guy came in behind Ed. Dean looked about ready to strangle someone. Even himself, if that’s what it took to end his pain.

“It’s past eleven, you guys,” Harry announced, reading the EMF meter.

Eleven? Shit… I’d been in a room with a fully corporeal poltergeist and not got an EMF reading that high.

“Nobody move,” Dean warned. “Hold on, just…”

“Stay still, stay quiet,” I finished for him.

All the flashlights began to flicker until, just for the briefest instant, not even a second, everything was dark. Then our lights came back on like normal and…

“Sam!” I called.

He’d been standing right beside Dean, his back to the boarded up bay windows. I’d been looking directly at him. He had been standing there, with his flashlight, looking around the room for any sign of what was causing the flickering.

But now he was gone.

Dean looked to where his brother had been. “Sammy!”

His flashlight was on the floor where he’d been standing. I bent down to pick it up, while Dean made a full 360 sweep of the room with his own.

“Sam!”

We all yelled, for Sam and for Corbett, but it didn’t make any difference. It was obvious they either couldn’t hear or couldn’t answer. I refused to even admit the possibility that they weren’t alive. A ghost that wanted to kill would just kill, right? Why grab them and disappear them off to… somewhere…

“Oh God,” Maggie muttered, shuffling closer to me. “I’m so scared. So scared.”

“It’s okay,” I said, just above a whisper. “We’ll find them. We do this kind of thing all the time.”

It did nothing to change the terror on her face, and I wasn’t much convinced either. Myself in mortal peril was not that concerning to me, except for what would happen to my dad. I didn’t want to die, but it was a risk I took. But Sam was gone, at the hands of a guy so crazy he had hoarded corpses _before_ he’d died. Who knew what he was like after forty plus years of being dead? And what might happen to Sam? That terrified me.

“Stick with me if you want,” I told Maggie.

We headed out into the hall to try knocking on some walls.

 

* * *

 

 

Maggie stuck with me all the way down two flights of stairs and back into that front room of the house. It was maybe five or six minutes, and throughout I could hear the others calling out too. Ed and Harry were already at their “basecamp” when we arrived, and not long after us, Dean turned up with the camera guy (Sprat? Spute? Spruce! His name was Spruce!).

Dean had the little box of papers he’d taken from the locker and he now dumped it down onto the table and began rifling through. I stood on the other side, picking up the stuff he discarded as rubbish, just in case I saw something he didn’t.

“Okay, so Daggett was a cold war nut, okay?” Dean said, frantically rummaging in the box. “He was… he was an amateur taxidermist. He liked to slow dance with cadavers and all he ate were c-rations, so what the hell are we looking for?”

“Horrible little life,” said Maggie, grabbing a pile of papers to look through.

“Yeah, a lonely life,” Dean said. “A cold war life. He was scared.”

I agreed with that whole assessment. But what did it tell us? “Scared… Scared of the Russians, scared…” I dropped my paper and looked up. “Dean! He was scared of the bomb!”

Dean stopped his rummaging immediately, letting the papers fall from his hands and back into the box. One hand on each of my shoulders, he gripped me tight and kissed my forehead, just on the hairline.

“How’d we live without you, Princess? Come on!”

The duffle was on the floor by the window, and we rushed over there. I grabbed the salt rounds and Dean took the shotguns, loading the rounds as I passed them to him.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” Maggie called, as we headed for the hall. “Where are you going?”

Dean had his shotgun at the ready and he was on a mission. Sam or bust. It was a miracle he didn’t just walk off.

“Guys like Daggett back then, the ones who were really scared of the Russkies… They built bomb shelters.”

“It’ll be in the basement,” I said. “Stick close, and we’ll…”

And then the door slammed. I’d been moving through from the hallway into the kitchen as I spoke, and the door slammed shut behind me, leaving myself, Dean and Spruce in the kitchen, and Maggie, Ed and Harry in the hall.

“Shit,” I said, trying the handle, just in case it was wind.

It wasn’t.

“What happened?” called Ed, all sense of bravado gone.

“Ed, Ed, oh God, this is real!” That was Harry.

“Maggie, listen!” I called through the door. “Go to the duffle! There’s salt. Make a salt circle and get inside!”

There was a very long pause, before we heard Ed reply. “Inside your dufflebag?”

Dean grunted with frustration. “Inside the salt, you idiots!”

“Okay!” Maggie called. “It’s okay, we got it!”

Spruce kept filming Dean as we went down the basement stairs. I was behind him, guarding our rear, just in case. I was very alert, so I could only half hear their conversation. Spruce was asking Dean what Sam had meant earlier, about Dean having two months left. Dean did not take well to such a personal line of questioning.

The basement was the same as the basement of any crazy-ass dude living far from town in a creepy old house. Bits of taxidermy that had been fucked up in some way, forming gross nightmare creatures. A few old cupboards with shelves all busted and doors hanging off the hinges.

Spruce was no help, as Dean and I kept looking around for some sort of clue to where the fallout shelter was. I kicked things, threw old cardboard boxes over to the floor. I’d been so sure when I’d thought of the idea and now it was looking like I was wrong and Sam and Corbett might not be alive and waiting for us to find them. And that was unacceptable.

Dean grabbed my shoulder suddenly, and I was about to snap at him when he put a finger to his lips. There was music. It was tinny and high pitched and I couldn’t quite make out the tune, but it was definitely there, and nearby.

We sought out the music, moving one way and then another, trying to see when it got louder or clearer. Dean was already moving a big cabinet as he called out. “It’s behind here.”

He didn’t need any help, and by the time I made it over there, with Spruce right behind me, Dean had already revealed the big bomb shelter door. It was just like in the movies; a big metal door, with an airtight seal, and a large lock you had to spin to open.

I could still hear the music on the other side, and now it was louder. It sounded like an upbeat pop song. But the ultra-wholesome old-fashioned kind, which did make sense, what with our guy dying in the mid 60s.

I felt so useless as Dean turned the big lock, but he didn’t need me and I’d only get in the way trying to get involved. So I just waited to one side of him, shotgun at the ready. I was all set to shoot whatever was behind that door, but Dean stopped before it opened, and came to stand where I was.

“You’re small and quick,” he said, taking the gun off me. He nodded to the door. “Just needs a couple more turns.”

I was a very good shot, but Dean was just as good, and this wasn’t the first time he’d relied on my smaller, nimbler body. Neither of the Winchesters were ungainly, but they were tall and bulky. I wasn’t particularly small, but I was naturally agile, and built for sprinting.

Grabbing the handles of the big lock, I could feel that it was loose, like the seal was weak. Dean was right, it would only take a few more turns and I could feel it get looser as I turned. Around once, twice, another half.

I pushed hard with all my body weight and the door swung inwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise profusely for my extended absence and sporadic posts. But I'm loving this episode, so hopefully I will have the next chapter sooner than a month from now!!!


	84. Chapter 83: Surprises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a surprising end to the hunt, Ellie surprises Dean… Or does he surprise her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to apologise in advance for gratuitous overuse of the word "bagel". Clearly I have bagel on the brain...

At first when I swung open the door, it was just darkness. The bomb shelter was not well lit and my eyes took a moment to adjust. Once they did, I could see just a couple of things. A table, with 4 or 5 people sitting around it and a lone figure that had turned towards me as I opened the door.

Our spirit was bald and dressed in an all brown ensemble that might have been his janitor’s uniform. He was unusually solid. I had never seen a ghost that corporeal before.

I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder the rarity of the sight. I ducked down immediately, and heard the blast from Dean’s shotgun, the salt round flying over my head as I rolled. It hit the walking spirit while I was rolling, and he was long gone by the time I got back up and onto my feet.

Before I’d ducked, I’d spotted Sam, tied to one of the chairs. I had rolled in his direction, so I was standing right beside him when I regained my balance.

“Are you okay?” I asked, grabbing my flick knife from my pocket and reaching for his ropes at the same time.

“Yeah,” he said, still breathing heavy, from either panic or struggling, or maybe both. “But…”

But it was the loud gasp of the cameraman that said it first. “Oh no. Corbett.”

Sam was already standing before I’d unwound all the rope, but he still wasn’t quite standing steady. He staggered a little from my weight as I leapt on him and squeezed.

“I’m fine,” he said, as though I couldn’t see his swollen eye and bloodied up face. “I just… I’m sorry, man,” he said, looking at the camera guy. “There was nothing I could do.”

“God this song,” Dean muttered, and for the first time since we’d opened the door, I could actually hear it playing.

Up until then, I was so focused on Sam I’d drowned it out. It was that song about _It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to_ and it was annoying as hell.

Dean was at the record player, and I heard the scratch as he moved the needle, putting an end to the torment of 60s pop. As he and the camera guy began to head for the door, I resisted the urge to try and scrub the blood off Sam’s face. I’d been asked if I was his mommy more than once, and I didn’t need to perpetuate that perception. I just felt really protective of him. Dean too, but Sam more so, for some reason.

“What’s this Daggett guy’s problem, anyway?” asked Camera Guy, as he moved ahead, walking backwards so he could film us leaving the basement.

We had to leave Corbett behind, until we had the whole murderous ghost issue sorted out. Poor kid, he hadn’t looked much older than eighteen or so.

“Loneliness,” said Sam, answering the question.

“What he’s never heard of a Realdoll?” Dean asked.

Ew.

“No no no, Daggett was the Normal Bates, stuff your mother kind of lonely. I mean, that’s why he lifted these bodies from the morgue, threw himself a birthday party. Except they were the only ones who would come. Anyway, so at midnight, he sealed them in the bomb shelter and went upstairs and ODed on horse tranqs.”

Wow. Sam had really done his homework on this one. “How do you know all that?” I asked. We’d done all the research together.

“Cause he told me.”

Oh.

“Okay, so now that he’s dead, what?” asked Dean. We had stopped for a moment, and he was reloading the shotgun with new salt. “Same song, different verse, trying to get people to come to his party?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Stay forever,” Sam said.

Camera Guy was apparently easily distracted. “Are those real bullets?” he asked.

I could see Dean force himself not to roll his eyes. “It’s rock salt.”

We made it back upstairs, but we still needed to break down the door between us and the others. At first I tried tried the door handle, but it was locked, of course. But, you know, that’s what we had Dean for. He was good at bashing things repeatedly. He combined physical strength with built up rage and a whole lot of determination.

He’d brought a long metal rod from the basement, sort of like a crowbar, or maybe more like a poker for a fireplace. Whatever it was, as soon as I backed away, he gripped it hard and launched himself at the door, holding the rod out and forcing it downward towards the door.

“How’d he hit that hard?” I asked Sam, looking up at the blood dried on his cheek.

He had a bloodied nose, and a nasty gash near one of his temples. That one had bled quite a bit, but it wasn’t really much of a wound, in hunter terms.

Sam particularly always seemed to heal really quick. I hadn’t mentioned this to him, but I had kind of wondered if it was because of the demon blood. Maybe it clotted quickly or something. Demons could take serious damage without blinking, so it wasn’t ludicrous to imagine Sam might have a little of that.

“Huh?” he asked. “I’m fine, Pea, seriously.”

“No, I know that. But usually it’s damage from being thrown at the wall or picked up and dropped or whatever. Not many spirits that solid, you know?”

He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. He was solid the whole time I was down there. Weird.”

“Yeah, but he can’t take a little salt,” said Dean, in between bangs. He hit the door again. “Bet he’ll burn right up, too, if we can find whatever’s keeping him here.”

He went at the door with renewed force, but he didn’t seem to be making any progress.

“There’s gotta be some factor in what makes some spirits more solid than others,” I said.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Your dad might have something.”

BANG! “You wanna read about spooks in your spare time?” asked Dean. BANG! “Nerds.”

A quick annoyed look at his brother, and Sam turned back to me again, but then he noticed we were still being filmed.

“Seriously?” he asked Camera Guy. “You’re still shooting?”

I’d thought it was weird when Maggie had done it, but she’d explained. “It makes him feel better,” I said. “Maggie says it feels more in control.”

“Ah, hell. Guys?” said Camera Guy, looking at us directly, rather than through the camera.  “Get in your ghost role thing. Something’s coming.”

I grabbed the shotgun, Dean flipped his iron bar around, turning it from battering ram to weapon in an instant. Sam had the pistol I’d originally planned to use.

Before he could say anything else, the strong, solid ghost of Daggett appeared right in front of the poor Camera Guy. With a heavy shove, Daggett sent his victim to the ground and then a metre or so backward. He dropped the camera as he fell.

Daggett seemed to flicker out, but then he was solid again and stepping towards Camera Guy. This time I had enough warning and was able to shoot, my salt rounds hitting him right in the chest.

I hurried to the Camera Guy, sprawled on the ground, after what was probably his first ever ghost assault. He seemed to be taking it quite well. Just a few rounds of _oh God oh God_ and he was letting me pull him upright.

“Ellie!” Dean called.

Before I could turn around, Daggett had hold of my hair, and he tore at it, dragging me along the ground. Again. Why did ghosts always drag me by my hair? Assholes.

I had enough reach to get my right arm around one of his legs and pull. He seemed to simultaneously fall and explode, as Dean had swung through him with the iron bar.

“Oh, you did _not_ go for the hair!” I shouted, standing up and grabbing for my shotgun at the same time. “STOP PULLING MY HAIR!!!”

I glared around the kitchen, looking for another flash that would preempt Daggett’s next appearance. I may not have had the greatest relationship with my hair, but I was _so_ done with ghosts trying to rip it out.

The flash was clear enough for me to see and be ready, but unfortunately, it happened right in front of Dean, so I couldn’t risk shooting and injuring him. Salt rounds ain’t bullets, but they’ll still hurt like a bitch. My reaction time _was_ quick enough to warn Dean, but he was still steadying himself from the swing-through with the bar.

Daggett took advantage of this to smash his big creepy dead weirdo arm into Dean’s chest, throwing him straight to the ground. I tried to shoot, but he disappeared as I fired and I didn’t know he’d appeared again behind me until I felt myself lifted into the air.

He dropped me straight down onto the ground again, nearly six feet or so. I landed on my stomach, knocking all the air out of me as I hit the hard concrete of the floor. I couldn’t do much but try to breathe, but I heard a grunt that sounded like Sam had been hit.

It can’t have been more than a minute, but suddenly Sam was crouched down close to my level. “You okay?” he asked.

I tried to say “winded” but I didn’t have the breath, of course. He seemed to understand that anyway, because he lifted one of my arms and very gently rolled me over onto my back.

“He’s gone,” he explained, his hard hand softly pulling my hair back from my face. “Take your time.”

I did my best to nod and kept focusing on getting enough air into me. I heard Dean, groaning from his own pain, but apparently upright. He was checking on the Camera Guy.

Sam’s footsteps as he walked away sounded kind of limpy, but his voice seemed okay. I hadn’t thought to look and see if he had more blood on his face than before. I could just about see him reach the door, and he opened it easily.

“You guys okay?” he called.

The reply was a jumble of voices, but it sounded like Maggie and her brother and the other guy were all out there. He went out, so all I could see then was a small section of the room near the door, and a whole lotta ceiling.

“You’re okay, buddy,” Dean was saying. “It’ll be a big lump, but hey, at least you’re a real ghost hunter now, huh?”

“Er… I guess. Did Corbett…”

“Looks like,” Dean said, cryptically. Then he raised his voice and called towards me. “You okay, Princess?”

I lifted one arm, my thumb up.

“Course you are. Your precious hair okay?”

I lowered my thumb and lifted my middle finger instead.

 

* * *

 

 

Sam had to explain to me what had happened, with some additions from Maggie. Apparently, poor Corbett had become a Death Echo just like the others. Only, with Ed’s help, he had managed to snap out of his loop and realise he was dead.

Then he had attacked Daggett’s spirit, apparently killing him for good. All the doors had sprung open, the other echoes had stopped, and that appeared to be that.

We burned Daggett’s corpse friends, but we buried Corbett, just in case. It would suck if we burned his body and he lost hold on Daggett or something.

It was almost dawn when we arrived back at the motel. I’d just about slept off the action when I got a text message. I’d given my number to Maggie, just in case she needed it. You know, for like… ghost stuff…

I met her a cute little English pub, quiet and comfy. She had some questions about hunting and what we did and what other kinds of things we dealt with. Since she and her friends were making a documentary thing, I kept pretty cagey about the whole business. Even off the record, I wasn’t willing to tell her about demons or vampires. She’d only go looking for them, and her friends too, probably. I just told her about some of the common types of spirits.

I also strongly advised her against doing what she did. I tried to explain to her that looking for angry spirits was not such a great idea. But knowing she and the others probably wouldn’t listen, I also gave her a few pointers, just to make sure they took precautions in future. Salt, iron, burning corpses, that kinda thing.

She was smart and funny, and really nice. Her hair was so soft and she was almost as strong as I was, without my unflattering shape. Way better butt than me. So I got a separate motel room. I dropped into the other one to grab my stuff and tell the guys I wanted my own space for the night. They knew I’d been out at a bar, so they weren’t exactly surprised. They didn’t know who I’d been out _with_.

 

* * *

 

Apparently I didn’t get enough sleep the previous morning, because I was out cold until I was woken by Dean’s enthusiastic morning voice.

“Wake up already, Sam’s getting breakfast! You and your friend want any… Oh.”

When his sentence had started, door swinging open, I had taken a moment to adjust to being awake. Before he got to the end, I had leapt up and across the room in one move. Fortunately I’d slept in an old t-shirt and shorts, thanks to the cold.

“Dean! What the hell?”

Maggie was now awake too, but taking things more slowly, sitting up and blinking at us.

“Sorry, Princess. I only knocked about fifty times. You should lock the door at night, by the way. I coulda been an axe-murderer.”

“Being you is bad enough! Get out!”

He held up his hands as he started backing towards the door. “I’ll tell Sam to get you gals a couple bagels.” He nodded politely at Maggie, who was looking a little more with it. “Sorry.”

Then he was gone and I locked the door after him. And kicked it, furious with myself for forgetting to lock it the night before. Then I punched it too, pretending that would remotely help me.

Before I could injure my hand throwing a second punch at solid wood, Maggie had grabbed hold of my shoulders and led me back to sit on the bed.

“Hey, it’s not worth hurting yourself,” she said, sitting next to me and grabbing hold of my hands with hers. “Just breathe.”

I took breaths in and out, counting like they’d taught me to do when I was little. In… Out… In… Out…

When I was no longer shaking, she let me have my hands back. She put one of hers on my back, and rubbed up and down soft and slowly.

“So… I’m guessing you’re not out?” she asked.

My voice seemed to freeze in my throat. I was going to have to have a conversation with Dean. And what if he told my Dad?!

I tried to focus on the breathing, feeling Maggie’s hand against my back. She had it up under my shirt, and the skin to (crazy-soft) skin felt nice, and calming.

“I… I’m not…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not out to many people, really. Not my parents or most of my friends. My brother’s cool about it, though.”

“Only Sam,” I managed to whisper.

Her soft palm felt so smooth and warm as it glided up to my shoulder blades, and back down again to my lower back. Up… Down… In… Out…

Some of my hair had fallen across my back as I bent my spine, my body determined to try for the foetal position. Maggie pulled it out of her way, but it fell back down again.

“Dean actually seemed pretty cool with it,” she said, now running her hands through my wayward hair, untangling it and trying to keep it out of my face. “Do you know for sure he’s gonna be an asshole about it?”

I managed to shake my head. Maggie pulled her feet upward to sit cross legged on the bed, behind me. She obviously liked playing with my hair, and I had no complaints. It felt nice. And anyway, I didn’t do this a lot, the whole… afterwards thing. I didn’t usually like it. I was all about quick gratification in a car, or a bathroom stall, or maybe, if I was feeling super classy, their motel room. I was very much One and Done. Anything else got… messy.

After a few more breaths I was able to speak at a normal volume. “I don’t know. He makes gross jokes sometimes, but not… just casually, you know? Not malicious, but enough to make me uncomfortable.”

“But Sam’s okay with it?” she asked, and I nodded, forgetting she was behind me.

“Your hair is beautiful,” she said. “It’s so thick. And soft. Smells good too, what is that, apples?”

“I love fruit smells,” I explained, leaning back into her, as she dropped one section of my hair to begin finger-brushing another.

“Mmm… me too. So, what do you think? Should we go get those bagels?”

 

* * *

 

 

After I’d showered, Maggie and I had a chat, just to make sure we were on the same page. I told her it had been amazing (it had) but that I didn’t do the long term thing. That had made her smile, and she said she was totally okay with that. She wasn’t really looking for anything long term either. But she was willing to come with me as moral support when I saw Dean.

I seriously considered that, but then decided against it. Turning up together for that conversation might give Dean the wrong impression. I was only interested in girls the same way I was in guys: brief and exciting.

We did show up to the boys’ room together, though. Maggie wanted her bagel.

“Hey,” Sam said, opening the door for us. “Hope you like cream cheese, Maggie.”

“Yes!” she said, with a happy fist pump. She stayed just inside the door as Sam handed her the little white paper bag. “Well, I better go.”

“Your brother invited us to see the film when it’s cut together. Day after tomorrow, so we’ll be in town til then,” Sam told her.

“Great,” she said. “Guess I’ll see you guys there. Thanks for the bagel.”

“No problem,” Sam said, giving her his cutest smile. It actually made me glad she was only into girls.

She just gave a goodbye wave and stepped back out into the parking lot. Sam shut the door after her and looked at me, as I dropped down onto a bed, with such force that I almost bounced right back off.

Sam sat down across from me, handing me my own bagel. I could hear the shower, so it was obvious where Dean was. Maybe it was for the best, having this little debrief first. Dean would definitely have told his brother what he saw, and Sam didn’t seem at all surprised to see I’d spent the night with Maggie.

“He’s really casual about it, Pea. Didn’t even seem surprised.”

It wasn’t until I unwrapped my bagel that I realised how hungry I was. Maybe it was the look or the smell, but it triggered something in me and I started devouring immediately. I didn’t normally tear into food with such large bites. It might have been the nervousness. Dean liked long showers, but he had to finish up eventually. Sam seemed to think it was okay, but it was too scary a subject for me to calm down without knowing the final outcome.

Sam left me to eat like a pig, but stayed nearby on the bed, doing something on his laptop. I had maybe three bites left when I heard the shower stop, so I all but inhaled them, trying to be sure I was ready to talk when Dean emerged.

He did, jeans on but no shirt. I forgot to even unsubtly perv, that’s how nervous I was.

“Maggie leave?” he asked, going over to his duffle and lifting it up onto the bed to sit beside me.

I nodded. “Yeah… um… listen, Dean…”

He rummaged in his bag, leaving a long, horrifying pause as I tried to think of the right thing to say.

“Um… about what you saw…”

Once he’d found a shirt and pulled it over his head, he grabbed his wrapped bagel and sat down in one of the crappy wooden motel chairs.

“Ellie, I’m not an idiot. You think I never noticed?”

This was so unexpected that something short-circuited in my brain for a moment, and I could neither move nor speak. Sam looked equally surprised.

“I… huh?”

“Seriously, Princess, you ain’t exactly subtle. You know other people can see which way your eyes are pointing, right?”

That Dean would not care about my night-time secret had seemed so unlikely, it had never even occurred to me that he might already know.

“What is that? Lettuce? Seriously, Sam, come on…”

“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked, watching him unwrap his bagel.

He shook his head in a sort of amused bewilderment that anyone would think he’d care about my sex life, or order bagels with lettuce on them. Then he took a bite, lettuce and all, before answering me through his mouthful.

“Course not. Doesn’t make you any different.”

I was unable to stop myself. I sort of launched forward and hugged him. He had to move quick to save his bagel. At first he seemed surprised, but then he put one arm around me, gently patting my shoulder a few times.

“Dude, has she been worrying about this?” Dean asked, looking up at his brother as I held his torso in a death grip.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “And about Bobby finding out.”

“Secret’s safe with me, kiddo.”

“Thankyou! I’m sorry I thought you’d tell…”

“No problem,” he said. “But… I gotta get some bagel in me. Gonna need fuel to cope with another two days in this lame-ass town.”

I awkwardly released him and went to try and squeeze Sam instead. Seeing me coming, he put his computer on the side table before I could get to him. I bounced across the bed, getting my arms around him and squeezing. Of course, he was so much bigger than me, I could barely keep hold of him.

After a few seconds, he wiggled free and retaliated by grabbing me back. Sam’s ordinary, loving hugs are bone-crushing. His playful hugs are fucking deadly. He squished me so hard, I couldn’t get any breath to fuel me as I whacked him with my fists.

Once I’d delivered a solid warning shot to his inner thigh, he realised the damage I could do if I decided to fight dirty, and let me go. As I regrouped, I caught sight of Dean. He had adjusted his seat to watch, and might as well have been eating popcorn, rather than a delicious round breakfast sandwich.

“Ten bucks says she kicks your ass,” he said, in between bites.

Now that money was involved, Sam readjusted quick and was about to lunge at me. I lay down, braced myself as much as I could against pillows, and used my feet to push hard on his torso. He did start to inch closer to the edge of the bed, which gave me the encouragement to push harder.

I could feel him losing control as I got him close to the edge. He knew he was going to fall, and began to look for something to anchor him.

Except that wasn’t what he was seeking at all. He grabbed my idle arm and pulled hard. Next thing I knew we were both falling.

Asshole.


	85. Chapter 84: Phone Trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam wants to keep looking for ways to save Dean. Dean wants to get on with the job. Ellie just wants them to be happy.

So…

My communications with Maggie after we split town were not exactly friendly. It was Dean who left behind his home-made electromagnetic device, deliberately destroying all the Ghostfacers’ equipment and video footage. Technically, I was not involved in the incident. I was a bystander.

But Dean was totally right to do it, so I made myself sit still and listen to a phone call that consisted mostly of screaming. Then I endured the waves of furious text messages. At first I kept responding to them, trying to explain why Dean had done it. I just kept replying and replying, until Sam threatened to take my phone and block her number. I didn’t want him to do that, in case she ever needed to call us to help her.

So, I stopped answering, and the messages got less and less frequent. Every time my phone went off, I still kept thinking it was her. When it rang, I sorta hoped it would be her, so I could try again and explain. I didn’t want her to hate me. I really liked her. Not in a Happily Ever After kinda way, but I would not have objected to seeing her again, if our paths crossed.

But it was obvious that was never gonna happen, so I just read each justifiably abusive message as it came, and then deleted it, like Sam had made me promise.

We spent most of March in the midwest, following up a lead on Bela. It came to nothing. Sam and I spent long days going over books, and Dad was doing the same back home. He’d bought a hefty 12th century tome off a guy in Spain. There were passages that looked like they might help, and references to some special demon who controlled crossroads deals and contracts. Apparently, she was almost as old as man.

Dad could read most of it, but he had to scan some pages for me. Dad’s Latin was good, but there’s always differences over time and geography. It took me a while to translate some of the more obscure words, and it was a waste of time, because there no name was given for the demon, no way of finding her.

Determined not to give up, we kept trying. Dean was more interested in taking cases, but there weren’t many around as far as he could see. There was a salt and burn in Missouri took us nearly a whole hour. Dad’s friend (and I guess ours) Annie called us from Michigan and we formed a posse to take out a nest of more than a dozen fangs. Three times, we just missed Ellen and Jo, passing one another before we realised how close we were.

We were in Kentucky, with just over a month to go on Dean’s contract, and we were still nowhere. But an idea had started to form in my head. Maybe there was a way. But Sam wouldn’t like it, and so I was still mulling it over, trying to find the right way to suggest it. Sam’s such a sweetie, but he was so tense and wound up in his fear for his brother, he could sometimes get very touchy.

Sam and I had a date with a retired theology professor, but Dean was meeting us after. The closer we got to the end of his contract, the more detached he became. Every day he was getting more annoyed with our efforts to save him. I figured he was trying to resign himself to his fate, and didn’t appreciate all the tiny leads that had come to nothing, each and every time.

And it was happening again. It didn’t take more than ten minutes with our theology guy to see that everything he said was theory, and that he knew even less about crossroad lore than we did. We were both seeking a polite exit when my cell phone rang. I almost flinched, still afraid of Maggie’s angry ranting. But it was Dad’s number.

“Sorry, I gotta take this,” I told the professor.

I headed out into the corridor before I picked up.

“Hi Dad. What’s up?”

If it was a social call, Dad usually waited until late afternoon. But it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet.

“How’s Dean?” he asked.

I shook my head, though of course, he couldn’t see that. “Just hit another dead end.” I grimaced as I realised I’d used the word “dead” in a tragically ironic context. “He won’t even let us talk about it in front of him.”

“He said anything about it?” Dad asked.

“Nope. I’ve tried talking to him, give him a chance to talk about how he feels or whatever. But you know Dean. He’s not up for that.”

Dad’s response was a gruff sort of huff. He and Dean were two cranky peas in an undemonstrative pod.

“So I got you a case in Ohio,” he said in the least subtle subject change ever. “Looks like a spirit. And a pissed off one too.”

After I got all the details from Dad, I peeked back into the office and gave Sam a little wave. I could see him say thanks to the useless professor and then hurry to meet me in the corridor.

“That was Dad,” I explained. “He’s got us a case in Ohio.”

“We’re already on a case,” said Sam.

Were we though? Or were we just desperately clutching at straws? Not even good straws. These were those crappy paper straws that are hard to drink from and get all soggy in your mouth.

I sighed as we headed down the corridor and back to the elevator. “Sam, I’m all in here. You know I am. There’s nothing I won’t do to help Dean.”

He frowned. “Except…”

“Except let you trade your dumb ass for his. Not gonna happen, Sun Drop.”

“Why?” he asked. “It’d just put things back the way they’re supposed to be.”

He’d been getting steadily angrier at me. As far as he saw it, there was a perfectly obvious option and I was crazy to keep forbidding it. Obviously Dean’s life was worth more than his and his time was up so it made sense to put things right.

Of course, that argument ignored that Dean’s time had also come. Twice. He’d been electrocuted and Sam had resorted to a faith healer. Who, as it turned out, had traded Dean for someone else. Then there’d been the car accident. Dean should have died. Would have, if their father hadn’t done a deal.

Sam had also failed to consider that crossroads demons didn’t want to swap. He tried that one time, and they seemed happy to have Dean.

“Two stupids don’t make a smart,” I said, as we walked out into a courtyard. Dean was meeting us just off campus. “Let’s just work this job, while we regroup and look for a new lead.”

“There _aren’t_ any new leads!” Sam wasn’t exactly yelling, but his voice was definitely getting louder. “Ellie, we’ve got five weeks left!”

“I know that,” I said, keeping myself calm instead of strangling him.

He was being just as stubborn as his brother. They were both determined to die for the other one. I was an only child, so maybe that was normal? It didn’t seem normal. All my friends growing up had hated their siblings.

Walking side by side, it was hard to have that conversation. Normally when Sam started getting heated, a little physical contact could calm him down. A hand on his was usually enough just to remind him where he was and who he was and drag him out of whatever dark place he went when he was scared and angry.

The obvious move was to take his hand, but that felt… weird? Somehow, putting my hand atop his while we were sitting together on the same bed was okay, but holding hands while walking was too intimate. Couples did that and Sam and I weren’t like that. Plus what if Dean saw us?

I reached out and put my hand in the middle of his back, rubbing up and down a few times. A sort of “I’m in this with you” gesture. I could feel the tenseness of all the muscles in his back, and they barely relaxed.

“There’s Dean,” I said, pointing. He was easily visible, though the big courtyard was busy. It was the way he sat on the park bench. Dean had such a confident, open posture. Sam always seemed to be trying to make himself smaller, but Dean spread out in a space, arms and legs and invisible aura.

We were coming up behind him, so our conversation had to stop. He sensed us coming from a few metres away, and stood up. He had soda cans in each hand, and he tossed them to us as we walked. It was unexpected, but with our hunter reflexes, easy to catch.

Ooh! Mine was cherry!

“So?” Dean asked. Maybe there was a hint of hope in his voice, or maybe I imagined it.

“So, the professor doesn’t know crap,” Sam said.

I was busy opening my soda, but rather than let an argument start, I changed the subject before I drank any.

“Dad called. Case in Ohio.”

This time Dean definitely sounded interested. “Yeah?”

We walked side by side, me in the middle. Sam drank his soda in a way that could almost be called pouty. But I was too sympathetic to think of it that way. He was hurting.

“So this banker guy has it all. Great job, happy marriage, no money problems. Doesn’t seem to be cheating or embezzling or anything shady.”

“There’s always something shady,” Dean said, giving me a little wink.

“Maybe,” I said. “He complains for over a week that something’s wrong with the electrics in his house. Everything’s going crazy, computer switching itself on and off. Phone flipping out.”

That seemed to get Sam’s attention. Electric weirdness is a sure sign of a spirit wreaking havoc.

“So what, this guy’s phone problems make the papers?” Dean asked.

“Nope. Not until he blasts a nine-millimeter through his face.”

From either side of me came a synchronised “huh”. I was glad it had Sam’s interest. He didn’t want to work jobs anymore, so it was great that I could at least get him to recognise that this case was worth our time.

“Bobby doesn’t want it?” Sam asked, frustratingly finding the one way he could acknowledge this thing was a job without agreeing to look into it.

Dean’s eye roll was epic. “Ohio, Sam. Us: three hours. Bobby: fifteen. You got some other job you wanna work?”

“Yes. Yours.”

I decided to drink my soda fast. I might be needed to come in between them, and I wasn’t dropping a full cherry soda just to stop them killing each other. Nothing’s that important.

“We’re chasing our tails, Sam. You’ve talked to every professor, witch, soothsayer and two bit carny act in the lower forty-eight. Nobody knows squat! We can’t find Bela, we can’t find the Colt.” Dean’s tone was getting steadily more agitated, until he stopped, took a breath, and gestured towards me. “Even Sunshine Lollipops here thinks we’re wasting our time.”

“I do _not_ think that!” I said, taking a moment away from my precious soda. “Sam, I don’t think that.”

I thought that.

Dean was still going. “We can’t find shit, and until we can, I just wanna do my job.”

“We haven’t tried…”

“No!” Dean and I yelled together.

“We should summon Ruby.”

“I’m not gonna have this fight with you,” Dean said. “And don’t you dare make Ellie have it.”

“She said she knows how to save you,” Sam insisted.

Neither of the boys had mentioned Ruby in front of me since The Leg Incident. I was happier pretending she didn’t exist, but I could tell Sam had seen her a couple of times. Twice Dean and I had spent a night in at a motel, watching an old movie and pretending like we didn’t both know where Sam was.

“Well she can’t,” Dean said.

I didn’t like Ruby and didn’t trust her, but I had wondered if maybe she did want to help save Dean. Not out of the kindness of her heart, but maybe because it served some purpose of her own. But that didn’t need to matter. If we could use her to save Dean, then gank her, that might be be a workable plan.

Plus I’d get to gank her.

“Oh really?” Sam asked, while I still had my mind fifty percent on soda and fifty percent on stabbing. “You know that for sure?”

“I do.”

“How?”

“Because she _told_ me okay!”

And that was more than enough to get me to look up from my delicious carbonated sugar water. “What? She told you that?”

“Flat out.” Dean said. “She can’t save me. Nobody can.”

“And you just somehow neglected to mention this to me?” Sam asked.

“Well, I really don’t care what that bitch thinks and neither should you, so…”

“So what, now you’re keeping secrets from me, Dean?”

I did my very best to drink as much soda as possible as quietly as possible. Maybe I should have slurped obnoxiously. Or spit some onto their faces and run away.

I just hate it when they fight, okay!

“You really wanna talk about who’s keeping secrets from who?” Dean asked.

Crap.

Like Dean said, it was three hours to Ohio. I had all but finished my soda, as we caught sight of the Impala across the road. It was hard to imagine which was worse: driving to Ohio with them fighting, or driving there with them ignoring each other in stony silence.

* * *

In the end, they went with silence, and it was unpleasant. I always have such an urge to fill silences, but I knew it wasn’t the time for my inane comments about the scenery. So instead I just looked out my window at grass and some other grass and also some wheat.

Dean had the music up real loud, and Sam didn’t complain any more than I did. He was staring out the window too. Dean’s claim of three hours was not accurate. We had to go a little further north than he’d expected, right on up to Lake Erie, about an hour out of Cleveland.

Even during our toilet and pineapple chocolate buying stop, we all exchanged few words. Just the bare minimum necessary to ensure the stop was as short as possible and that everyone was back in the car before we left again.

It was during the second half of the journey that I looked over the stuff my dad had sent me about the case. It was all as he’d described, our victim committed suicide suddenly after a series of electrical issues in his house. If it hadn’t been for the electrics thing, no one would ever have noticed anything wrong. I wondered how Dad even found out about it. His obit didn’t mention the phone going weird, because why would it?

With what I had, there was no way of narrowing down what we might be dealing with, or if we were dealing with a spirit at all. Maybe this guy happened to have electrical problems and also he killed himself. They do say a lot of men don’t show any signs of depression, so maybe he was just suffering quietly and no one knew.

With a sigh, I put my phone down and wondered if I’d be able to nap through three consecutive Zeppelin albums.

* * *

Even with our brief stop and some roadworks on the highway, we still made town by two-thirty. A good time to arrive, because it was late enough to check into a motel and change, but still early enough to visit the widow.

Dean called dibs on the bathroom, throwing his duffle onto a bed and taking his suit in with him. Sam lay his own suit down on the other bed, with the duffle beside it. We always kept one of my professional shirts in with Sam’s, so it couldn’t get crumpled. He unzipped the suit bag and pulled the pale pink shirt out for me.

“Thankyou,” I said, taking it from him, with my happiest face and voice. I wasn’t mad at him, and I didn’t think he was mad with me. Or Dean, really.

He just gave me a little smile in return, but there was no sign of dimple, which meant he didn’t feel his smile at all, not deep in his heart.

So I got up onto my toes and gave him a cheerful peck on the cheek, just to prove we were okay and I still loved him, no matter how much I disagreed with him.

He was smiling for real, before I’d even got down flat on my feet again. “What was that for?”

I shrugged. “Cos I love ya. Now, turn around and look at the wall, I gotta change my shirt.”

It wasn’t like I was getting totally naked or whatever. I even kept my bra on as I changed into my professional shirt. But I was kinda chubby in places I didn’t want to be chubby, and I’d prefer it if Sam didn’t know that. He was almost implausibly toned and fit, and I wanted to at least pretend like maybe I could measure up.

* * *

I may not have had the hips or stomach I wanted, but all considered, the three of us scrubbed up pretty darn well, really. Both my boys looked like they were modelling Armani, even in their cheap suits. With boots, a pencil skirt and a shirt that was slightly too tight, I managed to keep the focus on my positive physical attributes.

Sometimes I wondered how anyone could believe Sam and Dean were real cops or Feds. Sam’s hair couldn’t possibly be regulation! But perhaps there was an element of misdirection in it. People might have been blinded by hotness.

Mrs Waters was youngish, maybe late thirties. Hard to say, really. I’d gotten the impression from the stuff Dad sent that these were fancy rich folks, but not really. Maybe compared to me. But their house was ordinary and suburban, like plenty of my friends lived in growing up. She was cardigan and jeans, dressing like a slightly more presentable me. With much neater hair.

She looked exhausted, poor woman. Her husband had only been dead a couple of days, so it wouldn’t shock me if she hadn’t slept at all. She sounded tired too, just flat and bored almost, like she didn’t have the energy to care about anything anymore.

Since sketch artist wasn’t going to work as a cover, Dean told Mrs Waters I was a “forensic electrician” which is probably not even a thing, but she bought it. Maybe she was too tired to think about it.

She showed us into the room, which was pristine and clean. I hoped she’d had some professionals clean it. She didn’t need to be scrubbing her husband’s blood out of the carpet.

“I found him there,” she said, pointing to a spot on the floor. Her eyes looked like she could still see him there.

“Why don’t you tell us everything you saw, Mrs Walters?” Dean asked.

Her apparent apathy seemed to turn to irritation. “You mean besides my dead husband?”

“Just everything else you saw,” Sam said, soothing voice at the ready. “Please.”

She sighed as she looked around the room. “Blood. Everywhere. The phone was ripped from the wall.” I felt both the guys tense on either side of me. “His favourite scotch on the desk. What else could you possibly want to know?”

“Why was the phone ripped from the wall?” asked Sam.

“I don’t know,” she said. Personally, I’d wonder, but maybe she didn’t have the energy to.

“Would you mind if Miss Singer took a look at it?” Sam asked.

She gave a disinterested sigh and pointed towards the desk. The phone had been plugged back in and sat neatly. As I went over to look at it, I heard her telling Sam and Dean that she’d already been over everything. They gave her the usual vague platitudes.

I looked through the phone’s most recent calls. They were largely programmed in numbers, friends or family, probably calling with condolences. The night of Mr Waters’ death, there was an odd incoming call. SHA333 called at 11:04pm.

“I’m sorry Ma’am, what time did your husband die?”

She looked up and stared at me for a moment. “Ah… sometime after 11. Why?”

I didn’t answer, and that was enough to make her lose interest and look away. The moment she did, I caught Dean’s eye and tapped the phone.

“What about strange phone calls?” he asked, still looking towards me. I gave him a subtle little thumb up. “Receive any of those lately? Weird interference? Static? Anything like that?”

“No,” said Mrs Waters. She said it exactly the same way I say “no” when someone asks if I ate three pieces of cherry pie in one afternoon.

Dean must have made the same sceptical face as me, because she answered again, even more defensive. “No!”

“Mrs Waters, withholding information from the police is a capital offence.”

Well, it was sort of illegal, but it wasn’t a capital crime. Maybe in some countries? Either way, it was enough to crack that poor, exhausted widow.

“A couple weeks ago… uh… there was this…”

“This what?” asked Dean, with a tone I thought could have been at least a little more sympathetic. It’s not like we thought she’d killed him herself.

“I woke up one morning,” she explained. “I heard Ben in his study. I thought he was talking to a woman.”

“What made you think that?” Sam asked, as I came back from behind the desk. The phone had given me all the information it was going to.

“Because he kept calling her Linda. The thing is… I picked up the other line and nobody was there. Ben was talking to nobody.”

* * *

Back in the car, we went over what we had. It was definitely our kind of thing. And just as I’d hoped, Sam was totally into it. He was just panicking about Dean, but as soon as a real case needed his attention, he was all over it.

“So, I’m guessing there was a phone call at about the time he died?” Sam asked, turning to look back at me.

“Yep. Good thing you guys had a _forensic electrician_ on hand to go through the call history for ya.”

Dean chuckled, amused by his own bluff. “So, was this non-existent Linda the last call?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Incoming call at 11:04. Weird number, though. _S-H-A 333_. Ever seen a number like that before?”

The guys looked at each other for a moment, but both shook their heads. “Nope. Gotta be Linda, right?” Sam said.

“Gotta be.” Dean agreed. “But who is she? I’m thinking spirit only he can hear. If she’s family, the wife’s gotta know that. She sounded like she’d never heard of anyone called Linda.”

“Old girlfriend?” suggested Sam.

I mulled this over. Dead girlfriend starts calling happily married man, he pops himself so they can be together?

“I dunno. Guy’s alive and married and apparently happy. This dead girl’s gotta make a pretty compelling case for him to eat a bullet.”

By now, we were almost back at the motel. I was so glad to see my boys getting along and motivated by the job. I knew both of them were hurting inside, but I hated to hear them argue, especially with Dean’s contract up so soon. I was much closer than Sam to admitting it might actually happen, and I wanted them to be happy as they could be, together, before it did.

* * *

Our motel was in the middle of town, and we pulled back in at about four-thirty. Too late to go out and ask any more questions, but we could spend the evening figuring out our next move, and be good to go in the morning.

This time it was my turn for calling dibs on the bathroom. I wasn’t staying in my stockings and collared shirt one second longer than I had to. By the time I came out, the boys had shed their suits. Dean had his brother’s laptop open, while Sam himself was lying on his bed, obviously using his phone for research. I was all ready to pull my computer out too, but I didn’t need to bother. By the time I’d got my clothes folded to wear again and my stuff all neatly sorted out, they were both all but finished. I love it when the research is easy.

I sat next to Sam as Dean explained that he’d found Linda. She _was_ an old girlfriend. She was our victim’s high school sweetheart, killed in a car accident that he had survived. The theory she’d driven Ben to kill himself seemed plausible, but it still wasn’t entirely clear how. Or how she was still out there, what with being cremated and all. That and the time issue. Why now, after so many years?

Sam had been looking into that weird caller-ID. SHA333 was an old number. A century old. No one would still be using such a number, though, we supposed it was theoretically possible that the connection still existed, somewhere. Maybe somewhere that only the dead could access it?

We decided we needed to put a trace on it, but that left us with the question of how. In the end, we agreed on going to the local telephone exchange office and trying to get some answers out of the employees. We could pose as “from head office” plausibly enough.

And look at that, we were all ready for a new day, before we’d even eaten dinner. But there were plenty of bars right near the motel, and Dean and I agreed that what with us making so much progress in just a couple of hours on the job, we deserved a drink.

Sam seemed hesitant, but he did eventually agree to come, which was great. I wanted him slightly lubricated when I talked to him.

We picked a place that had a crowd, but not enough people to crush us. More than half the booths were full, there were two pool tables and three dart boards, all in use. The clientele were all sorts, some were a jeans and jacket crowd like us, but there were also people who looked like they were stopping for a meal after their office job ended. They’d take off their jackets and have a few drinks, all relaxed and casual.

It’s nice sometimes, to watch other people, to see them having fun, being with friends. The world’s basically a happy place, right? It’s good to be reminded of that.

Sam had the cobb salad, Dean and I had the burgers. I got extra fries, because life’s too short and not eating fries wasn’t making me skinnier anyway. After we’d eaten, Dean decided to play pool for cash. No hustling. Just an honest little weekly tournament the bar threw, all welcome.

Sam and I moved to the bar so we could watch and root for Dean. We were nearly at two beers each when Dean made a particularly good shot. I took my cheerleading seriously, standing up and loudly whooping for him. Sam was a little less enthusiastic, and when he was done applauding, I heard him sigh.

Okay. This was it. This was my moment.

“Sam… so… I have an idea. About Dean.”

“Okay…” he said, taking another sip of his beer. Given our last discussion had ended with an argument, I wasn’t surprised to find him wary.

“So… You’re not gonna like this idea at first, but just stick with me, please. Hear me out.”

He frowned now, shifting his body so he faced me more directly. He gestured with a little hand wave for me to go ahead with the idea.

“So, I’ve been thinking… We haven’t found a way around this contract. So… what if we…” I was getting nervous, just anticipating his reaction. “What if we just let Dean die…”


	86. Chapter 85: Thirsty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie tells Sam about her new plan to save Dean. Then she drinks too much. Alcohol, coffee, sugar syrup. They’re all fine in moderation…
> 
> TW for Ellie's body image issues.

“What the…”

My hand was already lifted before Sam spoke, so I quickly got my finger in front of his face to give him a silent reminder. I’d asked him to hear me out.

But I guess he never promised or anything.

“We’re not…”

“Hear. Me. Out,” I told him again, my hand jerking with each word, as I poked my Finger of Silence in the air in front of his face. “Obviously, finding a way out of the contract is first choice. But if we can’t, maybe there’s another way. We let Dean die, go to Hell, whatever happens. And then we bring him back from it.”

Sam blinked, looking at me, or maybe through me. I wasn’t sure if he’d actually understood me, so I tried using different words.

“Maybe there’s no way to stop Dean going to Hell. But maybe we _can_ get him out again. We’ve been so busy trying to find out who has his contract and how we can break it, we haven’t paid any attention to what happens after.”

Sam was still silent, and I could see his jaw click, so he was either angry or thinking. His eyes were dark brown, and that was usually a good thing,

“Obviously, trading someone else for him is not a solution,” I added, just in case his mind was headed in that direction. “But… maybe there’s some other way, you know? We could look. Whoo! Nice shot!” I had to include a little shout out for Dean, so I could at least look like I was paying attention. He seemed happy, so he must have done something good.

He gave me a wink and a thumbs up, before reaching for his beer. A tall blonde girl was selflessly holding onto it for him. He took a sip and gave it back to her, ready to take his next shot.

Meanwhile, Sam was processing.

“Have you ever heard of anything like that?” he asked, when I looked back to him. “Some way to come back that doesn’t… there’s gotta be some cost, right? We can’t get something for nothing…”

“Maybe we can,” I said, with a shrug. “Or maybe there’s some sort of price we can afford. We haven’t tried.”

Sam caught the bartender’s attention using just his eyes. It was a skill, aided by him being like eleven foot tall. He held up two fingers, quickly indicating we wanted another beer each, without skipping a beat in the conversation.

“Maybe Bobby knows. You asked him?”

I shook my head. Something told me Dad would not approve. He told me once that as soon as he saw Sam alive that wonderful day, he knew Dean had done something “so darn stupid, even for him”. He hadn’t really been able to hide how glad he was that Sam was okay, but he had not been happy about Dean making a deal.

_Ain’t no good way to bring a life back, Ellie. No smart way._

“Maybe we should do a little digging first,” I said. “Test the water before we bring Dad in.”

As he collected our new beers, Sam finally gave me a smile, his first since I’d brought up the unhappy subject of his brother’s impending end.

“Okay.” He handed me my new beer. “I’m in. Let’s try it.”

I had thought it would be harder. I was basically saying I didn’t think there was any way to break Dean’s contract, and I thought Sam’s strong feelings of denial might be a problem.

“You sure? It means less time on breaking the contract....”

He sighed before taking a large swig from his bottle. “Well, that’s not getting us anywhere. We tell Dean?”

I looked over at him. His opponent was lining up a shot, and Dean was barely paying attention. He was much more interested in his pretty blonde helper. Looked like Sam and I were heading home without him.

I shook my head. “He doesn’t like thinking about it. Let’s see if it can work, first. Don’t wanna get his hopes up.”

“Agreed,” Sam said.

I held out my free hand and took his, making him shake on it. He let go, shaking his head. But I could see him smiling, despite his attempt to hide it by taking another sip of beer.

“What?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” he said, his smile getting wider. Now he wasn’t even bothering to try and hide it.

I wished I’d known my idea was all he needed to start smiling again. I’d have mentioned it a lot earlier. Sam was always so optimistic, even when things looked real dark. Maybe he just needed this one little spark to start thinking positive again,

“Why you smiling?” I teased, nudging him and looking around the bar. “See someone you like?”

“No,” he said, and way too quickly for me to believe it.

Maybe I could bring more light into his dark days by helping him get laid?

“You sure? That redhead’s a major hottie.”

I hadn’t really noticed it happening, but I was starting to feel pretty drunk. Loss of inhibitions drunk, though. Nothing dangerous.

Sam looked past me, at the girl in question, a petite little thing with a short bob cut and boobs like you wouldn’t believe.

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.” He paused. “And she’s checking Dean out.”

She was. Dean was taking his next shot and that meant he had to bend over to an extent, and that man had one hell of a butt. Second best butt I knew. I was sure about that, because I had spent a not insignificant number of hours comparing and assessing. Sam’s was carved directly by the butt-angels, but Dean’s was a very close second. The redhead had no choice in it, really. It was physically impossible not to look. It drew the eye, like a Rembrandt.

“Could be trouble,” I said. “Blondie’s invested a lot of time in this hookup.”

“My money’s on redhead,” Sam said. “She’s short, but she looks pretty fierce.”

I shook my head. “Blondie looks like a scrapper. Definitely a girl who fights for what she wants.”

With a nod, Sam clinked his beer against mine. It was not our first conversation on that subject. We both found Dean’s pick-ups fascinating. How did he do it? I knew how to talk someone into sex, but I had to be consciously trying. Sam was super tall and super gorgeous. Women in bars noticed him, and I had often seen them looking him over, but it was rare that one made a move out of nowhere.

There was just something about Dean, some sort of allure or pheromone that seemed to draw women towards him. I didn’t believe he was doing it on purpose, but he had to know he was doing it. Maybe it was his confident demeanour. When he was consciously trying to pick up, he was deadly.

“How long you reckon I’d last if Dean came onto me? Like, for real?”

Sam couldn’t keep it to a smile now, and he was all-out grinning as he took another swig. “Either you’re gone in ten seconds or you get super stubborn and hold out forever, just to be spiteful.”

I laughed, because he was definitely right. My laugh made him chuckle and now his eyes had changed. They were all brown and green and golden at the same time, and it was like a million constellations and nebulae were inside him, looking out at me. What was it I said that time? Supernova eyes.

Even though I was drunk, I was with it enough to know that I didn’t want to get to that point again. No more trying to kiss him. I’d been lucky that it turned out okay that one time, and I was never gonna be that dumb again.

“Why you smiling?” I asked, desperate to take the conversation somewhere fun, so I wouldn’t take it somewhere destructive. “Oh my God, are you thinking about me and your brother? Dude, that’s weird!”

“I am not,” he laughed. “You’re so drunk.”

“ _You’re_ drunk,” I said, giving him a little poke in the ribs. Or at least in the obscenely firm muscle he’d built over the top of them.

Poking Sam’s pecs... Do not do it, kids. That shit’ll break your finger.

With a bottle of beer in one hand, he reached out with the other and pushed me so hard I almost fell off my bar stool. I managed to save myself by reaching for the bar and getting my feet in the right place. But I spilled beer on myself in the process.

“Dammit, you perv, now I got beer boobs!”

He had gone from amused chuckle to outright laughing. But I was right, he _was_ drunk too. He was at his mid-drunk level, when he was the most fun. Too much and he tended to be a depressed drunk, but if you kept him just above that line, he was inhibition free and overconfident. And _so flirty_. Honest to God, he put even me to shame.

I tried to sound like I was mad, but I wasn’t. How could I be mad when my friend was actually feeling something good for once? Even if it was alcohol induced, at least he was happy, just for a little while.

“Stop laughing, I’m all sticky!” I moaned, putting my beer down and trying, pointlessly, to wipe beer off my shirt with my hands.

“You wanna swap shirts?” he asked, pretending like he was gonna lift his over his head, and flashing me his abs in the process. Asshole.

If we’d been somewhere private, I was probably drunk enough to start unbuttoning my sticky shirt. I could totally beat Sam at chicken, and if I didn’t… well having him get naked to prove a point was something I could live with.

But sadly, we were in a crowded bar and this was no place for him to be getting undressed.

“Whoa there, hot stuff!” I pulled his shirt back down. “No one needs to see your gross perfect abs.”

He was still chuckling. “You love my gross perfect abs.”

He winked at me, and somehow, because it came from him, it seemed even more seedy than when his brother did it. Then he took a smug sip from his beer bottle.

There was no point in denial. “Shame they got your asshole face attached.”

But before he could reply, Dean potted the black ball, and we both got onto our feet to cheer him. I resolved to watch his next game very closely, and really enjoy the skill and intricacy of the game.

He won the tournament and I saw every moment, applauding with a wild enthusiasm that made me come off like his groupie.

But the distraction didn’t help. My dreams were still full of Sam’s gross perfect abs, and that shit was _not_ PG-13.

 

* * *

 

 

So Sam and I had a little too much, but we slept it off and were almost conscious the next morning. Dean returned from wherever he had slept, bringing us breakfast burritos. We ate them while he was in the shower.

“Can’t decide what’s worse for my liver, the booze or this stuff.”

Sam was about to bite into his burrito, but now he looked at it closely. Then he shook his head and took a bite anyway.

“I’m probably happier not looking at it.”

“Definitely,” I said, taking another bite out of mine.

You could have built a bridge out of the fat on the bacon. It was gloriously greasy, so Dean had clearly noticed how much we’d been drinking. It was so disgustingly, greasily good, but if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t exactly hungry. Half had been enough to fill me up. Probably because two thirds of my stomach still had beer in it.

“My body is a temple,” I sighed to myself, contemplating whether to keep eating it.

Sam made an uncharacteristic moaning sound as he ate. It reminded me of my dream, only there were no burritos in that scenario.

“Not when you’re hungover,” he said. “What kind of cheese you think this is?”

Sam tried to live clean, or as clean as you can eating diner food and takeout. But he had the vegetarian pizza (plus my pepperoni) and he tried to limit his fat intake and get plenty of fruits and vegetables. But when hungover, all bets were off, and grease seemed to ease his pain.

“Dunno. It’s good though.”

Sam’s only reply was a nod and another moan. It probably didn’t sound that sexual, but I was still reeling from my restless night.

“I’m not hungry, really.” I said. I was trying this new thing where I only ate until I stopped being hungry, rather than finishing any food put in front of me and then licking the plate clean. “You want the other half?”

Sam nodded, pulling it across the table towards him, still chewing.

Dean was in the shower, so I figured I’d just turn to face the wall and get dressed. Sam was trustworthy.

“Don’t look,” I told him, and he obediently turned his head to look at the wall while he ate.

I was out of my pyjamas and into my respectable outfit. I would probably be posing as an employee with the phone company, and that was a pencil skirt and collared shirt kind of deal. Dean said I looked like an air hostess in it, because of course he did.

Once I had the skirt and a bra on, I called for Sam to turn around again. I didn’t want him seeing me naked, but he’d seen me in just a bra loads of times, because I’d torn my clothes, or had a scrape or cut to the upper body.

Anyway, still munching on his wonderful grease, he was able to see me as I buttoned up my shirt. I didn’t say anything, but I gave an involuntary sigh as I noticed how tight it was getting. Not on purpose, it just sort of came out, as I considered that this was the exact reason I wasn’t eating the second half of my burrito.

And then, as I struggled with the last button, Sam stopped chewing. “Ellie?”

“Yup?”

“You know you’re not fat, right?”

I looked up, to see him with my unfinished burrito in his hands, looking at it, rather than eating it.

“I’m pretty chubby,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not really. I mean, obviously that’s okay. Nothing wrong with fat. But you’re more muscular than chubby. You’re in great shape, Ellie.”

“No, _you’re_ in great shape,” I said. What with the gross perfect abs and all. “I’m in good enough shape. But I could stand to lose a little off my butt and hips. And maybe shift that into my boobs.”

I sat down on the bed to put on my stupid pantihose. Why did professional have to equal pantihose? So irritating and you spent the whole damn day trying not to ladder them.

“Well, it’s your body,” Sam said. “But it’s just I noticed you’ve been going for the salads more and more. Which is great, good healthy decisions. Uh… But uh… I just thought maybe… Well, Dean and I _are_ in great shape so I get how you might think… This isn’t coming out right…”

“I think I know what you mean,” I said, getting off the bed so I could jump up and down a bit to try and get the damn pantihose to fit properly. They never seemed to stretch quite far enough up my waist, and the extra tall ones were way too loose for me.

Sam ran one hand through his hair. He gave a heavy sigh and regrouped.

“I just mean, uh… You don’t need… Not that it’s really my business, but I just... “

Sam was sweet and I knew what he was getting at, but he didn’t need to worry. I knew I was reasonably fit, though yes, a little chubby, especially in the butt. I was fit enough to keep up with him and his brother. But my body could be more toned and I if I ate more like he did, I could take off a few pounds, just to make sure I was as healthy as possible. That’s sensible, right? I wasn’t having a full on body image freak out. Was I?

“It’s okay, Sam,” I said, finally getting my damn pantihose to feel comfortable-ish and smoothing my skirt back down. “It feels nice to know it worries you, but it’s okay, I promise. I’m not gonna starve myself, I’m just trying to stop overeating, see if that helps me lose a pound or two.”

He frowned, with the little crinkles forming above his nose. “If you weren’t okay, you’d tell me, right?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to smile as bright and cheerful as possible so he’d believe me.

It seemed like he did, but I could feel his eyes on me, even when my back was turned while I rummaged through my makeup bag. I didn’t know how to stop his worrying. He ate healthy, so why shouldn’t I?

 

* * *

 

It seemed implausible for three phone company employees to show up at a small-town local exchange, trying to trace a weird phone number. So, the boys went by themselves, and I got to drive the fancy rental car. We sometimes hired one, when we needed to split up, or the Impala wasn’t plausible with our cover. I always liked getting to drive them, cos they were usually pretty new, with all kinds of cool buttons and gadgets to play with. And sweet, smooth steering. I grew up on a scrap heap. Barely saw a new car until I was in college.

I was sitting in a cafe with my fifth cup of coffee when Sam called. _You don’t understand!_ It helped with the hangover, plus also, they had all these different flavoured sugar syrups you could try and it was like drinking joy. Anyway, an hour’s a long time when you’re sleepy and alone and regretting the previous evening’s choices.

“What up, Sun Drop!?” I asked. Or yelled... “They trace it?”

“They can’t. Too old. But we got a list of the places called. The Waters place is one. Dean and I will check some out, but I’ll text you the others.”

“Oki doki, Captain!” I said, possibly because all that sugary coffee had not so much helped my hangover as gotten me high.

I could hear him smiling. How is that even possible?

“I got your text about the syrups. How many have you had?”

“What are you my Dad now?”

“I can’t be. You’re not rude enough to me.”

“Well listen to you, Mister Sassy-Pants!”

“I’ll text you the numbers. We’ll do half each and meet back at the motel.”

“Aye aye, Sir!”

“Next time maybe choose coffee _or_ sugar.”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“Bye, Pea.”

 

* * *

 

 

My first address was an apartment, and a very buff, very sweaty young man answered the door. I’d interrupted his workout. He said he didn’t have any connection problems, but he’d been getting a lot of crank calls. They were sick, he said, pretending to be his brother, who had died when he was sixteen. My disgust was genuine. Kids or a ghost, it was an awful thing to do. I went away very annoyed, and saying I’d look into it. Which I would.

At least the conversation brought me back down from my caffeinated sugar high.

Next was a house where an older man lived, apparently alone. He said there’d been no problems with the phone, except us raising the damn long distance rate. When I asked about weird calls, he paused for a little too long before saying no. I was pretty confident he was lying. Maybe because he _was_ getting calls from some long lost loved one, just like Mr Waters and the buff guy in the apartment. If he believed they really were the spirit of someone important to him, I could see why he’d worry about admitting to that.

The next house was a couple of streets away, and the area was quiet enough for me to swerve a little and test the power steering. Dean always said that one day I’d get to test the airbag and seatbelts too. He was always speeding and failing to look at the road, but I try and pull off full three-sixties in a Lexus and suddenly _I’m_ the idiot?

As I turned into the right street, I made sure to look like a sensible driver going about her legitimate and boring phone company business. I pulled over on the kerb, got out and checked my outfit was presentable. My shirt kept riding up a little all morning, and that was not a look I wanted.

The guy who came to the door was your typical suburban dad type. Mid to late forties, glasses, receding hairline. Collared shirt and sensible jumper, when home on a Sunday morning. Maybe he’d dressed smart casual for church?

There was a kid with him, too. Cute little guy, maybe seven years old and looking anxious. He had a ball in his hands, and he was bouncing it. I gave him a smile.

“Yeah?” asked the father.

“Good morning, Sir. My name is Elenore, I’m with the phone company.”

“Ah, we didn’t call the phone company,” he said, as his son lost control of the ball.

I caught it, and handed it back while still looking at his father. “No, but we’ve had a lot of complaints from people in your area, and we’re trying to ascertain the extent of the problem.”

Fancy big words sound more professional, right?

“Complaints?” asked the man.

“Yes, Sir. There’s been static, lots of dropped calls, that kind of thing. Crossed lines, maybe. Strange voices on the other end of the line…”

“No, we haven’t had any of that here.”

But I knew they had. As he spoke, a teenaged girl came into the hall behind him, and she stared right at me. She looked the way most people look when you tell them ghosts are real and there’s one in their house.

“Nothing?” I asked the man, without acknowledging I’d seen the girl. She was still looking at me.

“No,” said the father again.

“Fantastic,” I said. “Sorry to bother you. If you start experiencing any issues, let us know.”

“No problem,” he said, leading his son back into the house. As he closed the door, I could see the girl was still standing there. I raised my eyebrow at her, and then the door shut and she was gone.

I had to negotiate a bike and some plants to get back down to the kerb and my car. I had one house left to get to, and the boys had five in total, so it looked like we’d be meeting for lunch soon enough. It was a shame the girl hadn’t talked.

I unlocked the door, with the cool fancy central locking button. I loved the Impala, but it didn’t have a fancy button to unlock it. Forget the wheel, central locking, that’s a cool fucking invention.

“No way you work for the phone company.”

I was about to get into the car, and when I looked up, I saw the girl from the house. She was in the drive, arms crossed and looking at me. I suddenly knew what it was like to be my father when I was sixteen, because there was cold, hard sass in those eyes. _Nobody_ was the boss of this girl.

“Sure do,” I said. “Five years now.”

She continued with her deadly stare, over the top of the car.

“Then why do you drive a rental? And why is your outfit Kmart bargain bin?”

I smiled. This was a kid I could do business with.

“Second hand charity store,” I corrected her. “So you’re not the only one hiding something.”

“Why did you ask my Dad if he heard strange voices on the phone?”

“Why? Have you heard any?”

“No,” she said, exactly the way I used to say no when asked if I’d been drinking.

“Okay. It’s just a bunch of people have, and I said I’d helped them figure it out, so I gotta get going. Nice to meet you.”

I made like I was going to get into the car again.

“Wait…” I stood up straight to look at her. “So… Maybe I’ve been talking on the phone. With my Mom.”

“Where’s your Mom?” I asked, though I knew exactly where she was. It was all over the girl’s face.

“She’s dead. Like three years now.”

“How often does she call?” I asked.

That was it. For most people, that’s enough. Once they tell you the weird thing, and you respond and engage, asking for more information, that’s when they get comfortable and start to trust you. People expect to be told they’re making it up or they’re crazy. Once they see you accept their story, they feel better.

“A few times,” she said. “It started a week ago. I thought I was like crazy or something.”

That was three confirmed people talking to their dead loved ones. And I was pretty convinced that older guy from the other house had been getting calls too.

“Well, first of all, you’re not crazy,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on but I believe you one hundred percent, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, crossing her arms again, the way people do when they’re uncomfortable and want to feel safe.

I reached into the car and picked up the notepad I’d left on the passenger seat. There was a pen stuck in the wire loop holding it together. I stood back up so she could see me and came around to her side of the car, flipping through as I moved.

I found a blank sheet and wrote my cell number on it, with just “Ellie”, no further information.

“This is my cell number,” I said, holding it out but not coming too close to her. “If you need to tell me anything, or if something happens. If you need someone to believe you, no matter how weird it seems, you can call me.”

She took the paper from me and looked at it. But she didn’t reply.

“Well, nice to meet ya,” I said. “You have a good afternoon.”

She was still frowning at me, and even when I got the car started and headed down her street, I could still see her in my rear mirror, standing in her driveway.


	87. Chapter 86: Spirited Debate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean thinks something amazing has happened. Sam is not convinced. And Ellie does not want a piece of this.

I met up with Sam back at the motel. Dean had dropped him there, before heading out to do the last interview on his own. When I got there, Sam had already made a start on the research, on his bed, leaning back on the pillows, computer on his lap.

As I came in, he looked up. “So... Everyone’s getting calls from dead relatives?”

I shrugged my jacket off, and threw it over the back of a chair. I counted them off on my fingers as I came over to sit next to Sam.

“Yup. Guy in his thirties, thinks he’s getting prank calls, pretending to be his dead brother. Older guy, maybe seventy. He denied any issues, but he was hiding something. Third place, the father seemed to think everything’s normal, but his daughter told me her dead mom’s been calling. Oh, and lucky last… _The weirdest_ …”

“Doubt it,” Sam said, with a grimace. “We got the weirdest…”

“My guy’s been chatting with the ghost of JFK,” I said, climbing onto the bed and nudging Sam out of the way.

He raised an eyebrow. “We got an eighty-four year old having phone sex with her husband. He died in Korea.”

My first instinct was _ew_ , but then… “I guess that’s kinda sweet, in a way.”

Sam broke into a smile, his dimples deep as a couple of mineshafts. “You see sunshine in everything, you know that?”

I shrugged, and he shuffled aside so we could use half the pillows each.

“So, what you got? Any leads?”

He sighed. I could see his screen now, and he had multiple browser windows , showing the names of google searches he’d tried. They were all on a similar theme: _Ghosts AND telephone_ , _haunted telephone, phone wires AND possession_.

“Nothing so far,” he said. “We don’t know enough. There’s all kinds of spirits that can use phone and electrical wires. Any, really. But no explanation why they’re all here, in this town, _this_ week. And it can’t be all geriatric phone sex and dead presidents. What did Linda say that made Ben Waters want to eat a bullet?”

“Next time we’re at Dad’s, I should do some more scanning. Or at least cataloguing, so we can know what books might help, and call him to read up.”

“You want to call him on this one?” asked Sam.

I shook my head. “I don’t think we know enough yet. Like you said, there’s heaps of spirits can do this. We need to narrow it down. Is there anything in common with the dead callers?”

Sam shook his head. “Not that I can see. I was thinking maybe violent deaths, at first. But then we talked to a woman whose husband died of cancer, so that’s not it.”

“My first guy, with the little brother. Kid had some heart defect.” I said, trying to think if I knew anything about the other two. The girl hadn’t said how her mother died, just that it was three years ago.

“So it’s not cause of death, can’t be timeframe, either, because we’ve got the Korean war hero, JFK and a guy who’s been dead only two years.”

Old fashioned hunters like our dads tended to get things down on paper and draw them out, using string to connect things that were relevant. Sam and I preferred to work by computer, but there was something to be said for concrete facts, right out there in big lettering.

So, I ripped some pages out of my notebook and we wrote on them, and started distributing them on the floor, crawling all over it as we moved our spirits and the people they called from one place to another and tried to find something that matched all of them.

Gender and age weren’t it, neither for the dead nor the recipient of their calls. Relationship wasn’t it either. There were married couples, blood relatives and high school sweethearts. Then there was JFK, calling a history geek in his first year of college. That one was right out of left field.

We didn’t know everything about our subjects, so some stuff we had to guess at and others we couldn’t judge at all. We tried socioeconomic circumstances, based on the neighbourhoods the call recipients lived, but that was guesswork, and all over the place. Ben Waters was pretty well off, but at least two of the others lived in crappy little apartments.

There were some who had kids, but others who didn’t, plus the girl I’d met and the JFK college student. They were kids themselves. We got desperate and started looking at whether they had pets or a car.

I was sitting on the bed, staring at the piece of torn paper with “JFK Kid” on it. Sam was on his hands and knees, switching pages over and then frowning at them.

“It’s here,” I said. “It’s so weird, even compared to the others. Why JFK?”

I’d seen inside the kid’s bedroom and wow… This kid wasn’t just a fan… He was _obsessed_. He had more JFK pictures and news articles and magazines than any of my girlfriends ever did for a band or movie star. Even Hannah, who was convinced she was destined to marry Tom Cruise, had blank space on her walls. This guy had every spare inch filled.

He’d said JFK was his idol. Maybe that was it…

“Okay, so JFK is this guy’s hero. Makes sense for a girl to look up to her mom, right? And Linda died young, so maybe Ben idolised her in some way? You know, like part of some ideal that would never be…”

Sam pulled back from rearranging the pages, and looked up at me. “Hang on…” He took the JFK page from me and lay it down beside Ben and Linda’s page. I got back down on the floor to move the young girl and her mother.

“Old lady’s husband was a war hero,” said Sam. “So definitely a hero to his wife?”

“Right,” I agreed. “And you got the nurse and her grandpa, too.”

Sam nodded, and moved that page. It was only speculation, but the most plausible thing we’d found in a while.

“Oh,” I realised, reaching for the page next to me. “Workout Guy is getting calls from his little brother. Most guys don’t look up to their baby brother.”

“They do not,” Sam agreed, with a frown. “I don’t know, Pea. These people just aren’t connected.”

“It’s a small town. For all we know they all went to the same grocery store on the same day or some shit like that.”

He sighed. “Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of. How are we supposed to work this out? Is that Dean?”

There was a beautiful low rumble coming from the parking lot outside. It sure sounded like the Impala. We both looked over our pages again, and I’m sure my grimace looked just as frustrated as Sam’s.

Then there was the sound of a key in the lock and Dean burst in.

“Sam! Sammy!”

He sounded… alarmed? Excited? I wasn’t sure what he was, but there was urgency to his voice.

“What happened, are…”

“Dad! Dad called me!”

 

* * *

 

 

I cleared out of that motel room within seconds. Milliseconds, possibly. Before Sam could get more than a couple words in, I was grabbing the rental car keys and headed for the door, shouting “Burgers on me!” over my shoulder.

Yes. I am a coward.

I didn’t want to be present for _that_ conversation for so many reasons. First of all, whenever the boys talked about their father, they argued. They had different memories of him, so they invariably ended up offending each other by remembering things differently.

On top of that, I had seen Dean’s face as he gave us the thrilling news, and I could see in his eyes that he was not going to approach this case with appropriate hunter skepticism. Which would frustrate Sam. Who would try and advocate for more research. And that would piss off Dean. Then Dean would accuse Sam of not even _wanting_ to believe their father would reach out to them from beyond the grave. Boom! Instant shouting.

The third reason, if I was honest, is that I actually had never liked John Winchester. I respected Dean’s fond memories of him, and even the happy stories Sam sometimes told. But I had not liked him when I was a child, and even less as I grew up. Even though I didn’t meet him again before his death, he had parted on bad terms with my Dad, who had not been flattering. I liked him a little more, knowing he’d swapped his life for Dean’s. That was an act of love I respected, though I wished he’d showed Sam some of that love before he died.

I hated when the boys argued about their father, because I was afraid I couldn’t stop myself from expressing an unwelcome opinion. It was none of my business, so much better to disappear and look for food.

It was pretty easy to find the centre of town, and there was a Biggersons there. Maybe we ate it a lot, but we always knew what to order for each other. I sat in the parking lot, wondering if I should text Sam or just go right in.

I looked at my phone for a minute, then opened my texts. Sam was at the top of the recent numbers list, like usual. I was about to open up a new text when I got one from him.

_It’s okay. He’s gone already. You can come back._

_Sorry_ , I texted back. _I just couldn’t do it :( Did he leave angry?_

_Sort of. And it’s OK. It’s not your job to mediate our fights. You at Biggersons?_

_Yep! Salad or burger??? :D_

_Both!_

The text exchange ended with me sending him the little emoticon with the heart. Then I started a new message, this one to Dean.

_Sorry babe! I love u guys but I hate hearing u fight. :(  Apology burger?_

I waited a little longer to get his response. Sam said he had left again, so maybe he was driving. I was about to give up and get out of the car when the reply came.

_Gonna grab something myself_

_Ok if you wanna talk i’m up for it_

I threw in a heart emoticon for him too. I liked to believe he secretly enjoyed getting hearts. He never mentioned them, but I bet he’d miss them if I stopped.

_Im fine get yourself a burger_

I just sent back another heart, not knowing what else to say. I didn’t get the reply until I was inside, lining up to get to the counter. My cell beeped and I looked at it.

_I know ur hot 4 me princess but u gotta stop with the flirty txts. Ur embarrassing urself._

I hadn’t realised how much breath I was holding in until I suddenly exhaled with one big sigh of relief. He wasn’t mad.

 

* * *

 

 

I made it back to the motel pretty quick, and let myself back into the room, just barely managing not to drop the food. I needed both hands to open the door, so I had the bag tucked under my elbow, but it was hot and everything was kinda greasy. All up, it was trouble waiting to happen.

Sam was up off the bed right away, taking the bag from me so I could shut the door again without disaster.

“In retrospect this is probably too much food for one bag,” I admitted. Maybe I should have got a second bag for the fries, but whatever, I live dangerously.

Sam put the bag down on the table with a smile, and opened it up to distribute it between us.

“What happened?” I asked, grabbing my burger and sitting down, tilting my chair, and resting my feet on the table.

“Not a lot,” said Sam. “He said it was Dad, I said maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but why would he call? Dean said why is anyone getting the calls, and what should he do if Dad rings again. I told him to say hello, and then he got pissy, like I wasn’t taking the issue seriously or something.”

“So… you think it’s possible it _was_ your Dad?” I asked.

Sam was unwrapping his burger, but he sighed and looked up at me. “I don’t know. I guess… But wouldn’t that be a weird coincidence? Of all the people in this town, it ends up being Dean that gets a call?”

“Yeah, that does seem kind of unlikely. But your Dad was a strong-willed guy. Maybe his spirit or ghost or whatever saw you’re here and took the opportunity, used whatever the others are using, to contact you?”

“That does sound plausible,” Sam agreed, focusing on his lunch again.

I leaned forward to get my fries and then tilted my chair back on two legs again. I was stable and safe, feet still up, but far enough from the food to not be gross.

Sam nudged my foot with his elbow. “One day, you are gonna fall and hurt yourself and I am not patching you up.”

“I’ve got great reflexes, Sam. Like a cat. I flip and land on my feet.”

“You’re numble,” he said, with a smile.

I sat there thinking about it for at least a minute, until I realised he was quoting drunk me.

“Screw you.”

“Great comeback, Pea. Well worth the wait.” He smirked at me.

I ate my burger in faux-outraged silence, glaring across the table at him.

 

* * *

 

 

We spent maybe three hours continuing to try different google searches, and looking for connections between our dead callers. But we found nothing. I was starting to get worried about Dean and was thinking about texting again, just to check in.

But as I was considering it, he came in.

“Found anything?” he asked Sam. Not even a hello. Rude.

I supposed he had just had a disagreement with his brother, but I’d thought Dean and I were cool.

“After three more hours we’ve found no reason why anything supernatural would be going on here.”

“Well, you know, you think a Stanford education and a high school hook up rate of zero point zero would produce better results that that.”

“Hilarious,” said Sam.

I was on the couch with my laptop, and Dean came up behind me. He leant on the back of the couch, casually looking at my screen.

“Never mind,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “I’m sure Wisconsin’s a great school too.”

Better than lame Stanford, I don’t care what anyone thinks. “I majored in linguistics, not how to google weird shit. And I definitely had more hookups in High School than you ever did.”

He stood up again, and wandered over to our scribbled pages, looking at our latest attempt to link the cases together for a pattern. “Clearly you kids are just looking in the wrong places.”

“And what are the right places, Dean?” Sam asked.

With a cheerfully smug smile, he reached into his pocket and produced a small stack of colourful paper. Pamphlets.

“Motel pamphlet rack,” he replied, dropping them onto the coffee table in front of him.

With a brief curious glance at one another, Sam and I leant forward and took one each.

“Milan, Ohio,” Dean said, triumphantly. “Birthplace of Thomas Edison.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. My pamphlet (a graphic designer’s nightmare) proudly proclaimed this in large, sans-serif lettering. “So what?”

“So keep reading, Princess,” Dean instructed.

I could hear the little catch of breath as Sam tried to avoid openly scoffing at his brother. But then, moments later, his standard “huh” of surprise.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

Dean appeared very satisfied, and apparently with good cause. Sam leaned over to show me a couple of sentences in his own pamphlet.

_Milan is also home to Edison’s “spirit phone”, a device he believed could allow the living to communicate with the dead. Located at the Edison Museum, the spirit phone…_

I looked up. “I dunno, Dean… Seems kinda tenuous…”

He saw right through my attempt to tease him. “You’re right. This is almost… _too easy_ ,” he said.

I kicked lightly him in the shin as I got up. Then, as I had to duck under his arm, he ruffled my hair, causing static-filled strands to floof out all in all different directions.

But he ran off, and I chased him into the bathroom, where he closed the door on me. Dammit. My hairbrush was in there.

 

* * *

 

 

“Good thing we ain’t really here to see the museum,” Dean muttered, nudging me. “This chick talks even faster than you.”

He wasn’t wrong. Our tour guide had rushed us through room after room, prattling about Thomas Edison and his work, as she walked backwards and gave directions. Mostly without stopping for breath.

“...by the time of his death quiet at the back please and we’re walking, we’re walking…”

We followed the small group, sticking up the back so we could linger when we got to the spirit phone. It was one of those museums where they didn’t let you wander around on your own. I hate those.

“And we’re walking and here we have one of the museum’s most unique and treasured possessions Thomas Edison’s spirit phone did you know that Mr Edison as well as being one of America’s most beloved inventors was also a devout occultist ooh!”

I was still trying to take in her run-on sentences when Dean nudged me again. “What’s with the quotey fingers?”

She had done that several times throughout the tour, often using air quotes for perfectly ordinary words that didn’t require them. Now we had “occultist”. Was that a normal word? Maybe it was a quote-finger worthy word to non-hunters. To us, it was like using quote-fingers when saying “breakfast”.

The spirit phone was not very interesting, and if it wasn’t the reasons I’d come, I’d probably have paid no attention to it. It was a box with a big dial and a brass cone thing on, to amplify whatever sounds it was supposed to receive.

The guide went on. “He spent years working on this his final invention which he was convinced could be used to communicate with the dead pretty spooky huh?”

She used air quotes for “dead”, which was _definitely_ not a word that deserved them. She actually stopped talking for a moment to look at her watch, but then she went on, moving and leading the group as she did.

“And we’re walking we are walking we’re walking and we’re not touching that and we’re walking…”

As she took the group to the other side of the room, the boys shifted to stand on either side of me, as I approached the spirit phone. They positioned themselves around me until I couldn’t see the guide. She wouldn’t be able to see me either, thinking we’d all just stopped to read more about the spirit phone.

The EMF metre was in my pocket. I took it out and held it over the top of the phone. We’d worried there’d be a glass case or something, but there wasn’t. It was just the box thing, on top of a plinth.

I was expecting some sort of EMF reading, and I was so surprised to get nothing that I checked to make sure I’d turned the thing on. I had.

“Anything?” Dean muttered down to me.

“Nada,” I said. “It’s practically a negative reading.”

“It… it kinda just looks like a pile of junk,” Sam said, and I could hear some hesitation in his tone.

But Dean agreed. “It’s not even plugged in.”

“Does it need electricity?” I asked.

I could feel the boys shrugging, far above my head, as I put the EMF metre back in my pocket.

“Okay. Maybe it’s like a radio tower,” Dean suggested. “Broadcasting the dead all over town.”

“Could be,” Sam said. It was better than any idea he and I had come up with.

Despite the lack of EMF, Dean was pretty happy with the spirit phone as explanation. “You know, this caller ID is one hundred years old, right? Right around the time this thing was built.”

“That does seem like a weird coincidence,” I said.

Sam still retained his skepticism. “Yeah, but why would it all of a sudden start working now?”

“I don’t know,” said Dean. “But as long as the mouldy are calling the freshers around here, it’s the best reason we’ve got.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” said Sam.

“So maybe it really is Dad…”

As we dispersed away to keep following the guide, Sam and I managed to look each other in the eyes. And I could see he didn’t believe Dean’s mystery caller was the real John Winchester any more than I did.


	88. Chapter 87: One Of Those Mornings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is not having a good day. And she hasn’t even had breakfast yet.

I was still asleep when my phone started ringing. I woke up with my hair trying to consume my entire face. It took me a moment to understand what I was hearing, and then I started flailing around on the floor and under my blankets, trying to find the darn phone.

“Powerpoint,” called Dean. I looked up to see him sitting at the table by the window, looking at Sam’s laptop. The sun was coming through the window behind him, bright enough to suggest it was wake-up time anyway.

Then I registered what he’d said and went to where I’d plugged my phone in to charge. I pulled the cable out and finally answered.

“Hlo?”

My voice was sluggish and slurry, but I’d wake up properly in a few seconds.

“Is that… Are you Ellie?”

The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place who it was. Female, for sure.

“Yeah,” I said, coherent at last.

“It’s Lanie. You came to my house and said I could call…”

My memory clicked into gear and I recognised her. She was the teenaged girl from the day before. Her mother’s spirit had been calling her, and I gave her my number in case something else happened.

“Of course,” I said, finally conscious enough to use my professional voice. “Are you okay, did something happen?”

“It’s my Mom. She didn’t call this time, she messaged me. Online.”

Well, that was a new development. When I looked up, Dean was watching me. He mouthed words to me, huge exaggerated mouth movements to help me understand.

_About the case?_ That’s what he was saying. I gave him a nod.

“Has she done that before?” I asked Lanie.

“No, it’s always been phone calls before,” she said. I could hear a choke in her voice like she was trying not to cry. “I don’t know what to do.”

I did some calculations in my head. It was Monday, but term probably hadn’t started yet, which meant maybe Lanie was home alone while her Dad had gone to work.

“Are you home by yourself?” I asked her.

“Simon’s here, my little brother. Dad’s at work. Please come. I’m sorry I was rude yesterday,” she stammered, “I was scared, please come.”

“Of course I’ll come,” I said, and I didn’t even have to try to use a sympathetic tone. It just came out naturally. Poor kid.

“Thankyou, I’m so scared, she said things…” She broke off there, and I thought maybe she was full on sobbing.

“I’ll come as soon as I can,” I told her. “You just wait there, and don’t answer the phone, okay? And if the computer’s on, turn it off. I’ll be about half an hour, just sit tight.”

She thanked me again and I was already going through my duffle, looking for jeans, when she hung up.

“What’s up?” Dean asked, as I put the phone down and kept rummaging through my crap.

“That girl, Lanie. Remember, the one whose mother’s been calling? She says her Mom messaged her. Like, on the computer. She sounds really scared. I think maybe her Mom said something to freak her out. Where’s Sam?”

According to my phone, it was nearly 9:00, and Sam would normally have woken me up by then.

“Out power-jogging or whatever the hell he does. But listen, last night Dad…”

But before he could finish the rest of the sentence, the door opened. It was like we’d somehow summoned Sam back just by talking about him.

“Hey,” Sam said, as he came in. Damn, he was sweaty looking. How did he do that shit every day? I didn’t like to run unless it was away from or towards something specific.

He had three coffees in one of those cardboard carrying trays, and he sat it down on the table. He took one for himself, and pushed one across the table to his brother. The third was obviously for me, but I figured I’d get dressed first.

“You in a hurry?” Sam asked, as I hurried past him to the bathroom, a big ball of clothes in my arms.

“That girl with the mom phone calls wants me to come over,” I said, as I closed the door. Then I raised my voice a little, so he could hear me on the other side. “Apparently she’s instant messaging now too.”

“Okay, should we come with you?”

Good point, might be a good idea to take back-up. Hard to guess what was going to happen, and there was definitely more to it than Lanie had told me over the phone.

“Yeah, I’m not sure what’s up,” I called back. “She sounded scared, so I might need back-up.”

I had my clothes on, my hair brushed, and had just started on my make-up when the raised voices started.

“Then believe it!” Dean’s voice always got deeper when he was agitated. “If we get this sucker, it’s Miller Time.”

Sam’s reply wasn’t quite as loud. It was like he was trying to keep it down, but finding it difficult. “Yeah, that’s another thing. Dad rattles off an exorcism that can kill a demon? I mean not just send it back to hell, but kill it?”

I was only putting on a layer of foundation and a little concealer. Maybe some eye-shadow. But I figured I should drag the process out as long as possible. I did not want to walk back out into the middle of escalating Winchester Drama.

I took my time looking at the eye-shadow. Lanie already knew I didn’t work for the phone company, so I didn’t need to go nuts, but it put people at ease when I at least tried to look like I was a professional _something_ even if I never explained myself fully.

“This is heavy duty Dark Ages,” Dean was saying outside. “Fifteenth century!”

Well, I was just wearing jeans and a pink button-up, so I could go with some pale pink for the eyes and then the watermelon lip-gloss, which would give me a bit of professional sheen while simultaneously tasting amazing.

I could still hear the boys arguing, but I tried to block it out. They weren’t shouting exactly. But they were not trying to keep it quiet anymore, either. But I was all ready and I couldn’t think of anything else left to do. I’d promised Lanie I’d be quick.

“News flash, Sam! People are _supposed_ to be freaked out by ghosts!”

I made a quick decision as I opened the bathroom door. It was no good pretending like I hadn’t heard them argue. They both looked at me as I emerged, and I did my best casual walk, to put my make-up bag back in my duffle and get my jacket.

“Well, I’m gonna go see what’s up with Lanie,” I said, straightening up as I turned around. “Sam, are you gonna stay here and talk it out, or do you want to come with me?”

Sam sighed. “If you think you’ll need me, maybe…”

“Oh good yeah,” Dean said, sarcasm in his every muscle. “Go protect your girlfriend from all the nothing in this town. Meanwhile, I’ll be here getting ready to, you know, save my life.”

Dean was mad at Sam, so all of a sudden _I_ was in the line of fire. I hadn’t said shit.

“Fuck you, Dean,” I said, on my way out the door.

Sam didn’t follow me, and I could still hear their raised voices, until I turned on the rental car engine and slammed the door shut.

You’re not supposed to drive angry, but I’d promised Lanie I’d be there soon. I didn’t know what to think. Dean was definitely too close to this case to be rational about it. But pulling out of the lot, I started thinking that it wasn’t really something I could blame him for. He pretended like he didn’t care about his impending death, but he did, of course. And now his Dad (who he never got to say a proper goodbye to, by the way) was calling with the solution to all his problems.

Too convenient for my liking, and for Sam’s as well. But I could see why Dean wanted to believe.

On the other hand, I was pissed. It wasn’t the “protect your girlfriend” remark that had made me angry, though he probably thought it was. I was mad that he’d implied Sam and I weren’t trying to save him. We’d spent ten months trying absolutely everything we could think of, worrying ourselves stupid, letting him live life to the fullest while we desperately sought solutions. But all of a sudden, because Sam wasn’t willing to believe, he wasn’t trying hard enough? Fuck you, Dean.

But then again… Sam could maybe have been a little more tactful, I supposed. It wouldn’t have hurt to indulge Dean’s desperate fantasy, just a little. At least until we knew more. But that wasn’t who Sam was, and I loved both my boys just the way they were.

It wasn’t a huge town, so I didn’t have that long to sort my thoughts out before I got to Lanie’s house. Before I even rang the bell, the door swung open and there she was. She must have been looking out a window for me.

“Thanks, I didn’t… I don’t know what to do..”

“It’s okay,” I said, coming in. “You did the right thing calling me.”

After she shut the door, she crossed her arms over her chest, and though her face was red from crying, she was trying to keep that neutral calm expression.

“Now tell me what…”

“Simon!” Lanie interrupted me. I turned around and there was her brother, on the staircase, looking through the bannisters at us.

“She was here before,” said the kid. I’d definitely overestimated his age when I’d seen him. I’d thought he was seven, but he was younger, for sure. Maybe five.

The kid was wearing slightly baggy jeans, with a brown zip up jacket over a plaid shirt. He dressed like a tiny Sam, and I had to stop myself smiling at how cute that was.

“Ellie’s got something really important to tell me,” Lanie told him. “But I’ll come up soon, okay, we can read.”

“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t reach the railing, but he managed to pull himself up the last couple of steps and onto the landing. Lanie watched him go.

“So, your mom was instant messaging?” I asked. “Same program you usually use?”

“Yeah,” she said, still looking up, I guess to make sure her brother was gone. “I turned the computer off. It’s still off.”

It was great when a potential victim actually took your advice and followed instructions. Not a luxury I often got and it made me even more invested in Lanie. I was pretty invested already, truth be told. Poor kid had no mom (yes, I’m predictable). And anyway, I just felt this affinity for teenaged girls. I guess cos I was one once, and it was occasionally a rough time. I got where girls like Lanie were coming from.

“And what about your Dad?” I asked. “Does he know about the calls, and the messages?”

I suspected he didn’t, because his surprise seemed genuine when I’d asked him.

Lanie shook her head. “No. No he would never believe me. He’d just chuck me in therapy.”

Probably. Civilians weren’t usually willing to suspend belief, even if they saw it for themselves. Not for ghosts, anyway. Apparently a huge number of folks believed in actual literal angels, though, and I knew that was total hooey.

“Okay, that’s okay. Lots of times people don’t believe,” I told her. “Why don’t you show me the computer?”

 

* * *

 

 

Upstairs in Lanie’s room, she turned on her computer to show me. We opened up her messaging program, and there were the conversations she’d had with friends, but not the messages from her mom.

“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice breaking as she sat down heavily onto her bed. “They were there, I swear, she was messaging me!”

I remembered being Lanie’s age. Sometimes adults thought you were lying or wrong just because you were a kid. Of course, my dad would have believed me if I reported ghost activity. But he did doubt me.

One time, some kids broke into the school on a Saturday night and had a party and drank and stole some computers. A witness said I was one of them and I was not. But because Dad was away that weekend, he didn’t believe me. Neither did my friend Jody. She was a Sheriff’s deputy, and even though I was a bridesmaid at her wedding, she still believed the old lady who pointed out my picture in the yearbook.

In the end, it turned out to be Hannah Molleti who was there and she did look sort of like me, and I was vindicated and my dad and Jody apologised like four times each.

Anyway, my point is, even when a kid is super trustworthy like I (usually) was, adults still don’t believe them.

“I believe you, Lanie,” I assured her. “I know you’re not making this up. When your mom messaged you, what name was she using?”

Lanie and her friends all had screen names in the chat program, so the spirit or whatever this thing was probably used one too, and I bet I knew what.

Wiping her sleeve across her eyes, Lanie managed to avoid crying. “Um… some letters and then 33. I think it was S something. SAA33? Something like that.”

SHA 33. That was the number that was calling all the others, and just as I expected, whatever we were dealing with was sticking to it.

But if this thing could get to Lanie online, it definitely couldn’t be using Edison’s spirit phone. I was pretty convinced whatever was calling wasn’t really Lanie’s mom and that meant Dean hadn’t really been talking to his father either. But how to break that to him when I still didn’t have a better theory?

If only I’d been able to see those messages, but Lanie did the right thing turning off the computer.

“Can I sit here?” I asked, and Lanie nodded, shuffling a little so I could sit on her bed beside her.

“So what exactly did your mom say?”

“She said she wanted to see me. So, at first I thought I was supposed to go to the cemetery.”

Sensible conclusion. “Okay. And did you do that?”

She nodded. “Yeah. But nothing happened. But then… she started asking me to do other things.”

“What kind of things?” I asked, thinking of Ben Waters and his sudden suicide.

“Bad things,” said Lanie, and it was almost at a whisper.

Okay. Ben’s suicide was definitely starting to make sense. Linda had called him, and said something, talked him into it somehow. But why would Linda do that? And why would Lanie’s mother?

The simple answer: They wouldn’t.

So who would?

I didn’t want to intrude on her personal space, but she looked so upset. I just put a light hand on her back. I could feel her erratic breath, as well as hear it.

“I know this is hard, but I need you to tell me what happened, okay?”

She took another deep breath. “Mom told me to go to Dad’s medicine cabinet.”

Oh God.

“She wanted me to take his sleeping pills. Take all of his sleeping pills.”

I tried not to let my triumph show on my face. I was not remotely happy that this was happening to the poor girl, but at least it threw some light onto the whole case. Two departed loved ones talking the living into suicide? Not a coincidence. All I needed was to find a creature that wanted its victims to kill themselves, and that could use the phone and internet to do it.

“She was telling you to kill yourself?”

Lanie nodded. She’d given up trying not to cry and the tears were running down her cheeks, very slowly. “Why would my Mom want me to do that?”

I did not know. I was running through lists of monsters in my head, trying to figure out what would do that but I was coming up blank. There were things that could use a phone line. And there were things that would drive victims to suicide. But both together?

“I don’t know, Lanie. But I’m gonna figure it out, I promise.”

“I mean… just so I could come to her?”

And then it hit me. Like fucking _lightning_. Cliché as that is, that’s exactly what happened. Not even the embryo of a possibility had entered my mind and then it was there, fully formed and obvious.

Crocotta. It was an old fashioned _monster_. Not the remains of what was once human, like ghosts or vampires or even werewolves. We were talking about a ravenous monster, luring people into the woods by mimicking their loved ones.

“What... What did she say?”

I’d stood up suddenly, hand going to my cell phone, and this surprised Lanie. She stood up too.

“Uh… She wanted me to come to her…”

“What words did she use?” I asked. “Can you remember? Exactly?”

“Come to me,” Lanie said. “Come to me come to me, like a million times.”

I grabbed my cell, unsure if this was good news or bad. “It’s not your mom, Lanie.”

I couldn’t remember everything about the crocotta, but I didn’t need to. I had remembered the “come to me” part because it was so darn creepy. First time I read about them, I must have seventeen, but it still wigged me out enough that I had a nightmare of being lost in the forest while a shadowy monster called to me with my Dad’s voice.

_Jesus, Dean thought this thing was his Dad!_

Lanie followed me out onto the landing.

“Okay, just wait here, you understand? Do not touch the phone or the computer. No matter what.”

I started dialling Sam as I headed down the stairs, but it took a moment before I realised Lanie was no longer behind me. I looked back and saw her on the landing, looking into a room.

“Where’s Simon?” she asked, turning back towards me. “Shit, Simon!”

I ran down the staircase with her, both of us calling out for her brother. We didn’t hear him calling back.

We reached the bottom and turned into the hall. The front door was wide open.

“I forgot to lock it!” Lanie said, though much of it was muffled by her crying and her heavy breathing. “I’m supposed to keep it locked! Simon!”

She ran out into the front yard, yelling for him again.

Oh God, that little kid. He’d gone up to his room so obediently and it hadn’t seemed like he’d just walk out. His big sister had promised to come read with him soon, and he had seemed so content with that deal. He’d gone up to his room without complaints. Why would he come back downstairs and out into the street, less than ten minutes later?

Unless something called him out. Using a voice he knew.

_Not the kid_ , I thought to myself as I hurried out after Lanie into the yard. _God, not the kid, please_.

“Simon! Simon _please_!”

But Lanie’s cries weren’t doing any good. Either Simon couldn’t hear her or he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t, respond. But a kid can walk a good distance in ten minutes, and this wasn’t exactly a low traffic neighbourhood.

Then I saw him. Down the other end of the street, near the main road. A little figure with brown hair, I could only see from the back. But he had jeans and a brown jacket. I’d noted his clothes because of how similar they were to Sam’s. It had to be him.

“Lanie!” I pointed and she turned to look.

“Simon!” she called, but he was definitely too far away to hear.

Lanie started to run, but I grabbed her arm and quickly stopped her. I handed her my cell and took off after the kid myself. If Lanie chased him, maybe the crocotta would find a way to get both of them.

From what I could remember, it drove its victims to their death and then feasted on their souls. Well, it could have my soul, but it wasn’t getting any kids. Not on my watch.

I was not as fit as a Winchester. I had come to accept that I never would be. I had told Sam I just wanted to be in good shape, but well… that depends on what you mean by shape, don’t it? I wanted to _look_ better. But in terms of actual physical capacity, I was doing fine. Better than fine. My months of regular hunting had paid off and I no longer got a stitch running.

I pounded along the pavement no trouble at all, and I must have gone at least five hundred feet without even feeling it. Who knew how fast I was going? And maybe I wasn’t tall as the boys, but I had strength in my legs that even Dean admired.

Simon was crossing a road, and I was still too far away. It was only a small side street, but as I sped towards him, I heard cars blare their horns, not at risk of hitting him, but clearly annoyed. He didn’t react. Even at his age, a person should react to danger.

He was obviously being propelled by the crocotta and that horror made me pick up the pace even more, though I didn’t know where I found the extra reserve of energy.

Simon was crossing a nature strip, but on the other side was a wider road with way more traffic. It was like the kid couldn’t even see it, just maintaining his straight line on whatever course this thing had sent him.

He stepped onto the road as I reached the nature strip. I dove. A truck horn blared as I threw my arms around Simon’s waist and pulled him down with me. We both rolled onto the nature strip together as the truck carried on.


	89. Chapter 88: Filth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Those monsters, always tying folks up and gloating. Ellie is super done with this shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so first of all, Supernatural makes NO SENSE time-wise. They start first thing in the morning and then like the next scene it’s supposed to be night and then inexplicably day again! So I’mma just do whatever the hell I want with time, because this is ridiculous! I never noticed while watching it!

The truck didn’t stop. Nice. Nearly kill a kid and don’t even stop to make sure he’s okay.

Simon was clinging onto me, which I figured must mean he had come out of whatever trance state the damn crocotta had put him in. We’d hit the ground pretty hard, but fortunately, I’d been the one to take all the impact. He’d mostly just landed on top of me.

I could feel that I’d grazed my left side and some of my back on the asphalt, but I didn’t have time to worry about that.

“Come on, buddy,” I said, trying to keep it upbeat as I got him onto his feet. “How you doing, you hurt?”

He was crying but he shook his head, so at least there was that.

I got onto my knees so my face was level with his, and I took both of his hands in mine. “That was real scary, huh?” His tears got worse and he didn’t seem able to speak to me.

So I tried a hug. That worked and he clung onto me so tight that I figured I should just pick him up. He wasn’t a small kid, but I was strong enough and it seemed liked carrying him would be the quickest way to get him back down the street to his sister.

I could see Lanie. She was no longer outside her house, having run about a quarter of the distance I had. It was not that far and we could be back to her in two minutes or so.

“Look,” I said, as I got Simon steady, one hand under his knees and another up near his head. “Look, there’s Lanie. Wave to her so she can see you’re safe.”

Such a little trooper, he was still crying but able to wave to his sister anyhow. She waved back and that seemed to help a little. He was still crying, but not as much as I would expect. If a truck nearly hit me, I’d probably be bawling too.

When we got close enough to hear her, Lanie called out. “Simon! Thank God, Simon!”

He squirmed in my arms, and since he wasn’t really hurt, I figured I might as well put him down. He ran the last little distance to Lanie, who held her arms out and hugged him. It was sweet seeing how much they loved each other. They probably fought all the time, but when it’s life and death, that’s when you remember you love people. Even if they’re like my dad and you drive each other crazy!

It was another thirty seconds before I got to them and then we walked back to the house together. Simon was holding Lanie’s hand and he seemed to have stopped producing any new tears. But his eyes were all red and his nose was running.

“Thankyou so much,” Lanie said. “I can’t believe I forgot to lock the door. God, Simon, what were you doing?”

“Go easy,” I said. “I don’t think he was in control. This thing that’s been calling, I know what it is. I gotta call my friends for backup, but you guys just sit tight here and I’ll come tell you when it’s safe. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Lanie, digging into her pocket. I remembered I’d thrust my cell into her hand before I started running. She handed it back to me. “Don’t answer the phone, don’t turn on the computer,” she repeated.

“Right,” I said. We were getting close to my rental car now, and the keys were still in my pocket. “Lock the door. But you better stay with Simon anyway. Do something fun.”

Lanie nodded as she started leading her brother toward the front door, still hanging open. I went the opposite direction, back towards the car.

I called Sam before I got to the car.

“It’s a crocotta, Sam!”

“A crocotta?” There was a pause. “Right. Doesn’t it mimic people you love?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lures its victims that way and then eats their souls.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I remember. Wait, so Dean’s phone calls?”

“Afraid so. Are you with him?”

Sam sighed. “He left when I went to the bathroom. He won’t answer my calls, but he might answer yours.”

“Okay,” I said, opening the door and starting to get into the car. “I’ll call Dean, then I’ll come back and we can start figuring out where this son of a bitch is.”

“I’ll check your database,” he said.

With something like a plan in place, and Lanie and Simon safe at home, I was feeling better. I was angry and keen to kill something, but that was pretty normal. And I was still super pumped on adrenaline. But that was fading fast and the pain from the graze on my back and side was correspondingly rising.

Dean answered after the first ring, which was good news.

“It’s a crocotta,” I said, too amped for an opening pleasantry.

“Is that a sandwich?”

I smiled, in spite of the circumstances. “Scavenger thing? Lives in the forest and mimics the loved one’s voice. Then it whispers “come to me”. Eats souls.”

“A crocotta, right. Damn, that makes sense.”

He was taking it surprisingly well.

“I’m sorry, Dean. I know you…”

“Hey,” he interrupted. “Don’t those things live in filth?”

I had forgotten that, but I only needed to be reminded. He was right. A lot of monsters went for whole filth thing. God knows why. Just cos you eat people’s souls don’t mean you gotta smell like poop.

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“There were flies everywhere. At the phone company.”

They’d only said it in passing. We’d laughed about it, when they’d told me about Stewie, the guy who worked downstairs. The whole room was full of fast food garbage and other muck. There’d been flies all over the place. And he was watching porn on his work computer. Even metaphorical filth.

I considered the route to the phone company building. I knew roughly where it was, and the motel was on the way. I could pick Sam up, and we’d meet Dean there. It had to be the phone guy, right? He had access to the phone lines. It was a great cover.

I didn’t remember the crocotta being a human-shaped monster, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t look human if it wanted to.

“Good call. Listen, I’ll grab Sam, you meet us there, okay?”

“You got it,” he said.

In just forty more seconds, I had texted Sam, got the engine going and pulled away from the kerb. I smiled to see Lanie and Simon, waving at me from their front window.

The vile thing trying to hurt them was as good as dead.

 

* * *

 

 

Sam was waiting on the kerb by the motel and I’m not sure I even stopped the car completely for him to get in. He managed to pull the door open and get his butt on a seat though, and that’s what really matters.

“So what happened?” he asked.

I tried to summarise it in my head, while still paying attention to the traffic signals in front of me.

“So, Lanie got messages from her mom on this messaging program she and her friends use. Saying she should get a bunch of her Dad’s sleeping pills and take them.”

“Driving her to suicide? Like Linda with Ben?”

“Exactly,” I said. “The messages were gone when I looked. Then while we were distracted, something got the little brother in a trance or whatever. He went out the front door and away. I got him right before a truck hit him.”

“Shit! Was he okay?”

“They’re both shaken up,” I said. “But like I said in the text, it’s gotta be a crocotta. Lanie said the messages were “Come to me”. Those exact words. This thing’s evolved from creepy whispers in the woods.”

I glanced over long enough to see that Sam looked thoughtful. “Shit. So… where are we going? The phone company?”

“Right,” I said. “I called Dean and he reminded me about all the rubbish and flies downstairs. Remember?”

I could see him nodding as I turned to look at the traffic on my right. “Yeah,” he said, thoughtfully. “Crocotta live in the dirt. Nice one, Dean. Is he meeting us there?”

“Yep.” That was pretty much all the catching up done, on my side, at least. “So… you and Dean…”

He sighed. “It’s not like I’ll say _I told you so_. He’ll probably just not mention it, and we’ll be fine.”

“I hope so.”

“Did he sound… disappointed? When you told him it’s a crocotta?”

“Not really,” I said. He’d been pretty matter-of-fact. Maybe the reason he’d been so annoyed with Sam was that he never really truly believed it. Maybe his heart was just waiting for someone to tell him he was wrong. Poor Dean.

“I just… I wish it was Dad, you know? I wish he could really tell us where the demon with Dean’s contract is. Or even if he just…” His voice lowered almost to a whisper. “You know, just to talk to us.”

I did know. If I hadn’t been driving, I would have given him a hug, or at least reached over and put a hand on his shoulder or whatever. Maybe Dean thought Sam didn’t want to hear from their Dad, but I knew he definitely did. He had a lot left unsaid.

It wasn’t much further and I pulled into the lot at the phone company building a few minutes later.

Dean hadn’t arrived yet, so we sat in the rental car to wait.

Five minutes.

We called but no answer.

Ten minutes.

We called. No answer.

We played two rounds of 20 Questions to stop ourselves worrying. He was probably driving, right?

Fifteen minutes.

No answer.

Maybe he had arrived first, and gone in alone? Maybe the crocotta had him? But then.. Where was the Impala?

We got out of the car. Pretty much all of our weaponry was in the trunk of the Impala. Sam had come packing, of course, and I had my switchblade. But, to kill a crocotta, we would need to stab it through the back of the neck or along the spine. A stake or full-sized hunting knife was more appropriate to the situation.

“I guess we could improvise,” I said, looking at the trees lining the edge of the lot. “Grab a couple sticks?”

“Good idea,” Sam said. “I’ll do that. You try Dean again.”

Still no answer.

Sam had taken a fairly thick pine branch that had fallen, then snapped it over his knee, so we had a sort of point each. Nothing like as good as a proper stake, but it was more effective than the knife in my pocket was ever going to be.

“We gotta go in,” I said, shaking my head at Sam’s inquiring raised eyebrow. “We can’t just sit parked out here, it’s gonna know we’re coming. It must know we’re onto it.”

There were plenty of other vehicles in the lot, and the building wasn’t exactly isolated. There was stuff on either side. But one glimpse at Sam sitting in the car would be a pretty major tip off that we were onto this creep.

Sam sighed. “Where the hell is Dean?”

I don’t know if he was expecting me to answer, cos I had no damn clue.

Since he’d been there before, Sam knew where he was going. We skirted the entrance, and then he led me down an alley, with the building on one side and a high fence on the other.

I hung back, stick in hand, as Sam peeked in a window. Then he beckoned to me and moved out of the way so I could look.

I wasn’t sure that “filth” was the right word. Sure there were old fast food packages everywhere, and candy wrappers, but only on the desk. The floor and shelves were all quite neat, actually.

But it looked like the guy never moved from his desk. He had two monitors and a phone and a whole bunch of shiny lights that obviously meant something. The shelves and floor were probably neat because he only ever moved between his chair and the door.

As I was looking, he did just that. Standing, and grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair, he headed towards the door.

I nudged Sam, and ducked so he could see over my head and into the window.

“Crap,” he mouthed.

But was he headed to his car? Or going to the lunchroom, or for a bathroom break? Taking the jacket suggested he was headed outside, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was leaving. Did crocottas go for a smoke break? They do call it a “filthy habit”.

I looked down at the end of the alley. There were definitely enough vehicles out in the lot to hide behind, and watch for him at the front of the building.

Sam nudged me and I looked back at his face.

“I’ll stay,” he whispered. “You go. I’ll call if he comes back.”

The obvious unspoken addition was that I should call him if I needed to.

“Try Dean again,” I said, tightening my grip on the stick, before heading out of the alley.

Even Dean acknowledged that I was particularly skilled at stealth. I was just naturally super light on my feet. I guess it also helps not to be over six foot tall.

I stuck close to the fence as I reached the end of the alley, and then peered around the building. There was a big van parked between me and the door, and there was no one around, at least not in my line of sight.

I used four quick skips to get from the alley to the van and then crouched so my head was below window height. From there, I was able to stretch up and look through the windows at the door of the building.

It was only a minute or so before he appeared. It was definitely the same guy, and he’d put on his jacket. Maybe he was going somewhere nearby for his lunch break or something. But as he started to head towards a car, I realised I had a problem.

He was parked practically right next to the door, he was getting out his keys and I didn’t have time to call Sam. I’d have to grab the thing on my own and then shout for him. I was confident I could take it, but I had gotten used to working with the boys. Still, I didn’t have time to hesitate.

There was just a few metres between me and that monster. I thought about Lanie crying as she recounted what the thing had said to her, and of Simon, about to step in front of a truck. That anger fueled my silent steps across the lot, and propelled me as I leapt on it.

I grabbed an arm and pulled it back, twisting it hard. It was my strong left hand, so I had to wield the stick with my right. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t sharp enough. But how was he to know that?

“What the hell?!”

“SAM! I GOT HIM!” I got in closer to his ear then. “Yeah, you better believe I got ya, asshole!”

Damn thing tried to play innocent, like it didn’t know what it’d done. “Please… please don’t hurt me.”

“Cut the act. I know what you are. SAM!”

I’d never get enough strength into a stab with my right hand. Not for a stick that wasn’t really sharpened properly. But if I held onto it, Sam definitely had enough power behind his stabs.

“What… what am I?”

“And I know how to kill you!”

It was playing scared, with the shaking and stuttering, but I wasn’t buying it. These things don’t get scared like people do. They fight. It was probably trying to get me to loosen my grip. Not today, freak.

“Please… Okay, wait, wait. If we’re overcharging you for the call waiting or something I… I can fix that. I am your friend!”

I rolled my eyes, Oh come on!

“Please. Please just don’t kill me!”

I pushed the tip of my stick into its neck. Where the hell was Sam?

“Don’t kill me please!”

I felt the presence of someone behind me, right as something heavy smashed into the side of my head. And then there was just pain.

 

* * *

 

 

I woke up tied to a chair. They always do that, the monsters. They tie you up instead of just straight up killing you after they knock you out. If I was a monster, I would not be wasting time gloating about my triumph to hunters I’d tied and gagged. I’d just fucking kill them already.

“Seriously?” I asked, as I took in the rest of the room.

It was the same basement office where Sam and I had peeped in the window at the phone tech guy, Stewie. He was there too, tied up to my left, shaking and whimpering. Sam was on my right and still unconcious. I couldn’t see who had caught us, but we’d obviously made the wrong call, because it couldn’t be Stewie.

“Clark, I’m sorry,” Stewie was crying with fear. Now I felt real bad about threatening him with my sharp stick. Oops. “Please, please don’t hurt me.”

I couldn’t see Clark, whoever he was. He wasn’t in my eyeline, and I was focused on Sam. I tried to lean closer to him. “Sam. Come on Sam, wake up.”

“He’s not gonna wake up in a hurry, sweetheart.”

Our captor, this Clark guy, had been behind us, but now he came around in front, and I saw him. He was a pretty ordinary looking dude. White guy, 40-something, medium height, medium build, slightly creepy eyes. Ideal monster disguise, really. The sort of appearance that draws zero attention. He was carrying a impressively sized knife that would definitely kill someone.

I sat up straight again. “Lose the _sweetheart_ and the patronising tone. I’m a hunter, you’re a monster, let’s just do this thing with the minimum of bullshit, okay?”

He smiled, adding serious value to his creep factor. Was his mouth bigger than normal? It looked kinda weird.

“Okay,” he said. “You pick. Stewie or your boyfriend here?”

Look, I’m not saying all monsters are sexist, but they always seemed to think I was a girlfriend or sister or something just tagging along. Who figured this one out, huh? It wasn’t my “boyfriend” or my other “boyfriend”. It was me, because I was _a hunter_!

What was I tied up with, anyway? Probably a good thing to know. It was bound around my hands, behind my back. It felt smooth and quite thin, not like rope at all. More like plastic, or maybe rubber. Electrical or phone cord, perhaps? That would certainly be readily available, given our location. There were no other bonds, just those that tied my hands to one another, and then the chair.

If I told him to kill Sam first, that would buy more time for Stewie, and maybe he’d have to wake Sam up first. A crocotta fed on souls, but it usually lured them somewhere dark, first. This one was taking people to a metaphorical dark place, making them want to kill themselves. So… could he eat Sam’s soul while he was unconscious.

“Why not let Stewie go?” I asked. “He’s not gonna do you any harm. He’s scared, he’s just gonna run and not look back, right Stewie?”

He looked over at me, and I realised all he knew of me was that I had held a sharp stake to his neck and told him I knew he was a monster.

“Yes. I swear Clark, the scary lady’s right, I wouldn’t… I won’t tell anyone.”

I pulled my wrists apart from each other, as hard as I could, to figure out how tight my bindings were. Tight, but not impossibly. If I kept working at them, I might be able to get out before he killed anyone. I just had to keep him talking.

Clark was still circling the three of us, with his shark smile and cold eyes.

“Sam!” I hollered.

I could sense Clark behind my chair, and then he was gripping my shoulder and leaning over me. He put the tip of his knife on my thigh, pressing just enough so I could feel it was sharp, but not enough to cut through my jeans and draw blood.

“Maybe I should start with you,” he said, his lips almost touching my ear.

“Well, yeah, that’s an option, I guess.” Just be flippant, like Dean. Pretend it’s all fun and games, it always seemed to work for him. “But I don’t think I’m an appetiser. I’ve got more of a dessert soul, don’t you think?”

Meanwhile, I pulled my right thumb out from my bindings. Next step was to keep Clark talking and use that thumb to get the left hand free. The rest was easy.

The knife point went a little deeper into my thigh, as his face smooshed right up against mine. The crocotta-filth connection was definitely a real thing, cos the guy reeked. Like something dead. Ugh.

“I do. You’re definitely a sweet treat.”

“Well, don’t wanna spoil your dinner,” I reminded him. “You better eat Sam’s soul first.”

He straightened back up and I flipped my right thumb so it wouldn’t seem like I was breaking out, just in case he looked at my bindings. “You want me to start with him, huh?”

“Sure. To tell you the truth, he’s been pissing me off since we left Oregon, and what was that, three months ago?”

Thank God, he moved away from my chair, and I no longer had to tolerate his smell. He circled all the way around Stewie and in front of me. I got my right thumb under the cord so I could work at stretching it out and making more space. Then he came back around, to stand behind Sam again, I stopped.

He leant over Sam, just the way he did with me, but instead of the thigh, he put the knife against his throat. _Please God, let Sam wake up. Or Dean show up. Or SOMETHING God, come on, we’re the good guys here, give me a break!_

And then I realised. Dean wasn’t going to show up, because Dean had no idea where we were. It wasn’t him I spoke to back at Lanie’s house. It was Clark, splitting us up and getting Sam and I here alone.

Clark was pulling Sam’s head back, but poor Sam didn’t stir at all, he was loose and limp like a ragdoll. Well, I was already fucked, so in for a penny or whatever they say.

“Sam for chrissakes wake up!”

He didn’t, but Clark let go of his head, and it drooped down.

“You know… I think I’m going to wait until he wakes up.”

“Okay. Good plan,” I agreed. “Listen, you’re right, he is my boyfriend. And when he wakes up, there’s gonna be all kinds of drama and sobbing and offering to die for each other. You’ll love it. But unless you let Stewie go, all you’re gonna get is us both protecting him, so…”

“Not necessarily,” Clark said, as he moved behind me and back to Stewie again.

“You’re not a killer, Clark!” Stewie called desperately, as Clark now leaned over him, just the way he had with me. “There’s a good man inside of you, I know it.”

“What do you think, Pea?” Clark asked. “Am I good man?”

“Just let him go,” I insisted.

Clark shrugged, as if he was bored with talking to me. “I would. I really would. If only I’d had more than a salad for lunch. You see, I’m starving.”

Then he lifted his knife up and over his head, bringing it down towards Stewie’s chest.

“No!!!”

But Stewie was dead before I had even started to shout. The knife still in his flesh, the blood dripping from the wound, just a little above the heart. Then there was Clark…

And I’m not kidding you, the dude dislocated his damn jaw. No wonder I thought his mouth looked weird. He opened it much wider than any human could do, revealing his long, horrifying, pointed teeth. Then he gripped onto poor Stewie’s shoulders and leant in close.

Some kind of white misty stuff started floating out of Stewie’s mouth. The closest thing to it was maybe the smoke demons became when they weren’t possessing someone. Except demon smoke was all black. But that made sense. Crocottas ate souls and that’s what the white stuff must have been. So demon smoke was actually their souls too, maybe, all blackened and corrupted?

I didn’t want to look, but I felt I had to. Someone ought to be a witness to Stewie’s fate. I had no idea what he was like as a person, aside from enjoying fast food and watching porn at work. But no one deserves to die alone and have their soul eaten, so they never even got the option of crossing over to the other side.

It didn’t take long. Maybe thirty seconds, as Crocotta Clark’s face glowed with the energy of the soul he was consuming. Then he clicked his jaw back into place, wiping his mouth like me after a spaghetti eating contest (2nd place, Minnehaha County Fair, 2002 - 2005).

“When I called Dean. That was you,” I said. “You wanted me to come here.”

He gave another patronising chuckle. “Some calls I make, some calls I take. But you have to admit, I had you fooled for a while. All that Edison phone crap.”

He was moving towards the big glass case around the telephone exchange equipment. He put his hands on the glass and then, weirdly, pulled what I’d describe as an orgasm face.

“What the _hell_ are you doing?” I asked.

“Killing your friend, Dean. Or maybe I’m killing another guy. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”


	90. Chapter 89: Sad Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a monster to kill, but when it’s over, Sam doesn’t really feel like celebrating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did my best to write about Sam discussing Jessica. I know a lot of people have SamJess headcanons, so I tried to avoid being specific about any of it. Hope you are all happy to fill in the blanks.

Clark stood there for maybe a minute or so, his hands on the thick glass of the booth that held the telephone exchange equipment. I didn’t know what he was doing or how it might harm, Dean, so I had to just focus on getting myself untied and stopping him.

I fought to get my chair closer to Sam’s, hoping I could kick him or something, but then I thought why bother?. Clark had been holding his head up with a knife to his throat and it hadn’t woken him, so why would a little nudge from my foot help?

It was back to wiggling my thumb back and forth to loosen the bindings and free a hand.

“Dean thinks the demon with his contract is in a house downtown. And I’ve got a cop heading there now. Thinks he’s gonna find the guy who killed his daughter there. Where’s your money, Sweet Treat?”

Dean. For sure. But obviously my preference was for the fight not to go down at all. And not to be called Sweet Treat, though doubtless my soul would be delicious.

Clark finished his weirdly sexual fake phone call fun and came back towards us. First he came to Stewie, pulling the knife back out of him, which caused a fresh spurt of blood to pour out. Poor guy died quickly at least.

I needed to keep stalling. “Okay, so I get how you mimicked Dean, you met him. But how’d you pull off being his Dad?”

They love to tell you how clever they are. Always buys time.

“Well, once I made your friends as hunter, it was easy. I found Dean’s number, then Sam’s. Then yours. Then Daddy Winchester’s. And Daddy Singer’s too, by the way. And then I had everything. Emails, voicemails. You see, people think that stuff just gets erased, but it doesn’t. You’d be surprised how much of yourself is just floating out there, waiting to be plucked.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to let the effort I was putting into breaking my bonds affect my voice. “But Dean’s not an idiot. He’s not gonna buy this. He won’t kill the guy.”

“Then the guy kills him,” Clark said, with a smile, twirling the knife in his hand like I sometimes did with my flick knife.

I could still feel that little flick knife in my pocket. Dumbass had taken my phone from my other pocket, but hadn’t even searched me further. Which is a little insulting, to be honest! Like I wouldn’t come prepared.

“Technology,” he said, coming towards me again. Dammit, I had to stop pulling at my bonds. Or he’d see my shoulders move. “Makes life so much easier. Used to be I'd hide in the woods for days, weeks, whispering to people, trying to draw them out into the night.”

He used the knife to sweep some of the hair that was in front of my face.

“But they had community,” he said, like it was a dirty word. “They all looked out for each other. I'd be lucky to eat one or two souls a year. Now when I'm hungry, I simply make a phone call.”

He chuckled again, leaning over me with the knife. “You're all so connected. But you've never been so alone.”

And then, I don’t really know what happened. But he was raising the knife, and then he wasn’t there, because he had just been crash tackled by six foot five of sheer muscle.

Sam had not been unconscious at all, and who even knows for how long. All I could do was sit and watch, still trying to break through my bonds the way Sam obviously had, while Crocotta Clark was distracted talking to me.

They were on the ground, Sam on top and punching once, twice, three times. Then Clark managed to get a leg around Sam’s to knock him off balance. With Sam on the ground, I worked harder at my bonds, but it just wasn’t happening. Handcuffs had never been a problem, but there was just no room to move with those cables.

Clark got up, and he’d gotten hold of the knife. He held it high, ready to stroke downward at Sam. His aggressive attack forced Sam across the room. He had the upper hand as he smashed Sam into the glass protecting the exchange.

But Sam rallied quick, with a punch to the face and then a heavy kick. Clark punched him back, making him stumble, but not enough. Then he raised the knife again, but Sam was strong. He kept one hand on the arm with the knife, keeping it up high so Clark could not stab at him. His other arm gripped onto Clark’s clothing, lifting him up slightly.

He kept pushing, not quite straight backwards, but with apparent purpose. And I realised what that purpose was when he reached his destination.

Clark’s back was to one of those boards full of holes, where you stick in pegs or hooks or whatever to hold all your tools. And there were a number of very long metal hooks sticking out. Sam was planning to use one of them to stab Clark in the back of the neck, as recommended in the lore. I was sure of it.

It was a struggle, and I kept at my bonds as I watched, just in case things ended badly for Sam. But they didn’t. He moved Clark this way, then that, then slightly over there and then up and BAM!

Sam used a little move he learned from me, pushing hard on Clark to give him room to move and then, with a flat palm, hitting forwards with the hard scaphoid. The power behind it was phenomenal and it was enough to push Clark back onto the hook.

There was a splatter of blood on the board behind him, a beat of silence, and then blood trickling from his mouth. He was definitely dead.

“How long were you awake?” I asked, as Sam stood there, panting a little.

“Since before you,” he said. “But not long enough. Not long enough for Stewie, anyway.”

Poor Stewie. He was a weird messy guy who watched porn at work, but that didn’t mean he deserved to have his soul eaten. No one deserves that.

Well… maybe Sarah Bowman, who bullied me relentlessly Sophomore year. Unless that had already happened, which would explain a lot.

Sam didn’t have his breath entirely together when he came behind my chair and grabbed onto my wriggling, squishing hands.

“How close did I get?” I asked, as he started undoing the knot in the cable.

“So close,” he lied. “You were almost there.”

Once he’d undone the knot, I was able to get up, rubbing my back as I did. That chair had not been comfy.

“You’re such a liar,” I teased. “We should definitely call Dean.” I patted my jeans pocket, though I knew it was empty. “He took our phones.”

We managed to find them pretty quick, just sitting on a shelf on top of a file box. Sam called Dean right away, and it rang out.

“Do we try to find him?” I asked. “And what about the bodies?”

We decided to leave Stewie where he was, and looked for Crocotta Clark’s keys. We used his own car to transport his body just outside of town where we could burn it and bury what was left. We didn’t need local law enforcement finding him. Although I did find myself laughing at the thought of a medical examiner getting him on the table. What the hell would they think was up? Would they go alien or weirdly deformed human or secret military genetic enhancement program?

Dean rang before we’d even got out of town.

There’d been a fight, but before long, Dean had figured out something was definitely not right about the situation. The cop with the murdered daughter had taken some persuading, but then he sort of broke down. Dean convinced him he’d had some sort of psychotic episode, because of the stress.

I couldn’t help but smile at the idea of Dean sitting down with a guy and recommending therapy.

 

* * *

 

 

Once we’d dealt with the aftermath, we headed back to the motel. While the guys started to get packed up, I went outside to call my Dad real quick. I was pretty proud of myself for figuring out what we were dealing with. Even if I had spent the big action sequence tied to a chair.

After that, we were gonna check out and then skip town, via Lanie and Simon’s house, so I could tell them in person that everything was okay. They weren’t supposed to answer the phone, and how else would they know for sure it was me?

I went back into our room and I could just tell from the atmosphere somehow, that they’d talked about the case and their dad. Dean went into the bathroom, so I was able to whisper to Sam.

“He okay?”

“Sorta. Should we tell him? About your idea?”

I was pretty confident I might actually have a workable idea. But I wasn’t sure Dean would be too happy about a plan that involved letting him get torn into pieces by invisible hounds and dragged to Hell. I wouldn’t be. But it was the only thing I had left.

“Maybe not. How about I focus on that and you keep looking for something better?”

“Deal.”

“What’s a deal?” asked Dean, coming out of the bathroom.

“He won’t take any of my fries anymore if I don’t make fun of his other dietary choices.”

Dean raised one eyebrow, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. He grabbed his jacket and it was impossible to say if he believed me or not.

It never took us long to leave a motel. You have to keep your shit neat and together, just in case the get-away needs to be super sudden. We were all ready to go within minutes.

 

* * *

 

 

We did what we usually did, and kept driving until it started to get dark. That gave us a good six hours, more than far enough to avoid trouble. Especially since the Winchesters were legally dead and unlikely to be on a suspect list.

Driving through a decent sized town in West Virginia, we came across a cheap but acceptable motel in the same street as at least three bars. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there, and clearly this was fate. We checked in first, and then headed straight out to look for food and more importantly, post-hunt booze.

We drank all the time while on a hunt, but serious drinking was for between cases only. No getting loaded while working a job. Unless Dean left a bottle of whiskey lying around while Sam and I were both depressed, which obviously was a special circumstance and also something which we needed to never talk about ever again.

First bar had burgers and even something they called a salad. It was mostly brown-looking lettuce, so I let Sam take my fries. I couldn’t let him starve. He wouldn’t have the energy to work on his abs, and then where would I be, huh?

We had a couple of beers there and then decided to try the next one, because if you’re gonna stay in a street with three bars, it seems wasteful not to drink at all of them. Dean paced himself, while I was counting drinks. I wanted to be semi-drunk, but not completely loaded. I needed one beer every hour, with a shot every ninety minutes. That usually did the trick. Dean said it made me fun, and I always felt pretty good about it.

Never got to the third bar. The second was too full of pretty girls and Dean was looking for a good time. I had no problem with that. Eye candy everywhere and that’s all that I was up for.

Once she figured out we weren’t together, a super gorgeous woman started to hit on Sam. I’d have gone there, and I made myself pretty scarce and let her get on with it. Sam deserved to bang a cute redhead with a frankly amazing butt.

But about an hour later, he came to find me and said he was heading back to the motel. I went with him, and we left Dean to go about his business.

“How come you didn’t hook up with that girl?” I asked, as we made our way back down the street. “I mean… you don’t have to answer, obviously…”

He sighed. “I liked her. But I don’t know, I just… It was that job… People getting calls from dead loved ones, and I… It just made me think about Jessica…”

“Oh honey,” I squeaked, grabbing onto his hand instinctively. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry, I didn’t even think of that. Of course.”

He let go of my hand and I made sure to step away so I didn’t impulsively invade his space again. Poor Sam. Poor Jessica. From what he’d said about her, she sounded really nice. I knew how she died, but I wasn’t sure if she’d been already dead before the fire. I hoped so. The alternative was awful.

There was a Hell. So if there was a real Heaven, I liked to think Jessica was there. She surely deserved to be, because she had loved Sam and made him believe, even sometimes, that he deserved it.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, as we turned into the lot of our motel.

“We don’t have to,” Sam said, with a slight shake of his head.

“But do you want to?” I asked. “If you want to, then I want you to tell me.”

He hesitated, but then it all just came out. All the way across the lot, into the building, up the stairs and into our room. A brief hiatus while I went to the toilet. Then we sat on his bed and he kept talking. I talked too, a little, to ask questions or acknowledge something he said.

He told me about meeting her and about their first date. About finding out what kind of coffee she liked, so he could bring her some before class when it was cold. I heard about how they studied together, and even though they weren’t doing the same classes, just being in the same room gave him more energy. He talked about realising he was in love with her and how he knew because it wasn’t like anything he’d ever felt before.

They went hiking together, because Jess liked to sit and look out over everything below. She was an artist and she would explain to Sam why things were beautiful. He said that even though that might sound like it would be boring, it never was.

He went to the bathroom. Me too, and then I got my pyjamas on and brushed me teeth, coming right back to sit with himon the bed again.

He told me how he still thought about her sometimes. When we had to hike to a suspected wendigo attack one time. Or when he saw a painting she would like. But it was happening less and less. Sometimes weeks went by and he didn’t think of her at all. He hated that he didn’t. She’d died because of him and the least he could do was to remember her every single day.

It sounded to me like Jessica wasn’t the sort of person who would blame him or want him to be sad forever. But this was about Sam saying the things he needed to, so I let him talk and didn’t interrupt with my own opinion.

He let four or five tears out, but that was all. I thought that was a good thing. He was starting to move on, recover from the trauma of it. But he was still remembering her. It actually seemed healthy to me, though I wasn’t an expert on grieving or anything. You have to reach a point where you go about your life and stop dwelling on it, don’t you?

Then he reached a point where he had said enough.

“And that’s all, I guess,” he said. “I’m sorry, we’ve been here…” He looked over at the crappy alarm clock. “Two hours. Wow.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can tell me more if you want.”

He shook his head, and smiled, a real dimply one. “No, I… I feel… I feel good, Ellie. Like there was stuff inside that needed to be outside, and now it is.”

I was so glad he felt better, I couldn’t help smiling, despite the tragic subject matter. Two hours of my time was a small price to pay for Sam to feel better.

“I feel bad for talking about myself for two hours, though,” he said.

“You weren’t. You were talking about Jessica.”

He smiled again, stretching his arms out above him. We had been sitting still for a long time. “Can I ask you something? It’s sorta personal.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t imagine Sam being really rude, so whatever it was, I could always just refuse to answer. “Sure.”

“You remember when you emailed me one time. You were drunk…”

“Oh no!” I squeaked.

I did remember. He’d written something about Ash asking after me. I’d been so drunk when I got it that I just replied angrily, saying something about Ash having his chance and I wasn’t into men who couldn’t commit or something like that. I still had the email, spelling errors and all.

He laughed. “You said you were only interested in two kinds of men. One good night…”

“And happily ever after,” I finished with him. “Yep. I said that. Why? You wondering what I meant?”

“I know what you meant,” he said. “It’s just… you don’t seem at all interested in the second kind. Not judging you… I only thought maybe there’s a reason and you’ve never really talked about it.”

No one had ever asked. I wasn’t keen to bore Sam with my pathetic love life. Who was I gonna tell? My dad? Dean? Not likely. Tonya knew it all, and so did my friend Jody. And Jo knew a lot of it too. But we never talked about what it meant and how I felt about it.

“I have…” I hesitated and then laughed at myself. Fuck it. There was obviously still enough alcohol in me to squash my usual hesitance to get personal. “My track record is super bad. Like astonishingly bad. You couldn’t make this shit up, seriously.”

Sam nodded. “Because you only like assholes, right?”

Hardcore understatement. “Pretty much. I started with Dean and it went downhill from there.” Sam was looking at me, all attention, and not saying anything, so I went on.

“My first proper boyfriend, Junior year. Not a nice guy.” That was as much as I felt comfortable saying. I’d need a lot more alcohol before I dredged that one up. “Anyway, after him there was the guy who dated me most of senior year because he needed parts to fix up his car. Then he dumped me two weeks before prom.”

Sam sucked in breath. “What? What an asshole!”

I nodded. “And he’s a saint compared to the first guy.”

“I’m sure you’ve mentioned a prom date. Who took you?” he asked.

“Guy who had no one else to ask. Plus he’d heard I was…” I searched for the right word. “Easy. Which I kinda was, since I slept with him anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “That sucks. You deserved better, from everyone in that story.”

I smiled. Sweet Sam. Yeah, Mike was an asshole to dump me, but everything that happened with Brad was on me.

“Anyway, then there was college.” I counted them off on my fingers. “Dropped out and left town without telling me. Cheated. Cheated. Slept with him on the third date and he never called. Already had a serious girlfriend back home and never told me. Cheated. Then Chris. He’s actually a lovely guy and I’m still friends with him. We email sometimes.”

“What happened?” asked Sam. The bed shook as he shifted his weight.

“He met someone else. Told me, real apologetic, said he’d realised he didn’t really love me. And I wasn’t broken up about it… like at all. So then I knew I didn’t love him either. He married the other girl. Moira. She’s gorgeous. I was at the wedding.”

He smiled. “I’m glad there’s one decent guy in the list, even if it didn’t work out.”

“Me too,” I said, reminding myself to email Chris and Moira and ask about their baby. “After Chris there was another cheater. Then like four or five guys who never called. I was in a bad place and making poor decisions. Often alcohol assisted. After that, I dated this guy Jackson for nearly six months. Didn’t get dumped that time. I left him because he pretended to his parents that we weren’t dating.”

Sam nodded and then his smile widened and I saw he was chuckling quietly. Sorta rude, but forgivable because dimples.

“What?” I asked, smiling back. I couldn’t help it.

“It’s just, I feel so proud of college Ellie. Even though it was at least five years ago.”

I was still smiling. I was proud of college Ellie too. She’d started to wise up. Sorta.

“Then there was what Tonya calls Ellie’s Semester of Frat-Related Fuckery.”

“That does not sound good,” Sam said.

“It was not.” Not even worth discussing. “So, then I focused really hard on academics for my Senior year.”

“And you got great grades,” he said. “Didn’t you say your GPA was like a 3.5?”

“3.4,” I said. “I maintain Professor Gerber had it in for me.”

“So what happened after that?” he asked, totally invested in the story of repeated assholery that was my entire romantic history.

“Dated a guy back home for like three months, then he cheated. Next guy was Ash.” I’d explained before how that had turned out. It started to get serious and he wanted out, then changed his mind. “I was so mad at him,” I said. “But… now I tell it this way, he was pretty damn fabulous, comparatively.”

Sam just nodded understanding again before I went on. “Anyway… I met a guy in a bar, went home with him. He called and asked me out again. I made a deal with myself. I said Ellie. This is getting ridiculous. It hurts way too much. So I promised myself that if he cheated on me, or dumped me in some messed-up way, I would give up, at least for a while. Focus on hunting or something.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “And here you are.”

“Yep.”

I could hear his hesitation in his breathing. “So… were these all guys, or…”

“All guys,” I said. “There’s no way I would have dated a girl through all that. Maybe now. Maybe. But I was way too deep in denial until like…” I counted back to myself. “A month ago? But I doubt it would help. It’s me. I make poor choices.”

So poor. It was like some kind of special talent. I had an almost supernatural knack for going out with total dicks and then being surprised when it ended badly.

But Sam shook his head. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It was their choice to treat you like that. All of them.”

Unfortunately, I’d already gone down a dark road. A road I always avoided travelling and tried not to even think about.

“You know what’s the worst part?”

Sam shook his head, waiting for me to go on.

“No one has ever been in love with me. I’ve been in love so many times, with so many people, and none of them ever felt that way about me. Not once.”

Chris was the closest I ever got. Sometimes, I wished that he had lied to me. Couldn’t he have lied and said he did love me, but that he was leaving me anyway? At least then I’d have felt special, eventually. Like there was more to me. Sure, friends loved me, but I was forever unwanted, romantically.

“But hey, never mind,” I said. “At least I’ve got that slut reputation. Ellie Singer, a good lay, that’s me.”

Sam’s eyes had turned to their very brownest as he looked into my face.

“No, seriously,” I told him, with an attempt at a smile. I needed to brighten up. This whole night had been about what he needed, not my pathetic life. “I’m okay with it. I got a choice, right? I could see it as a negative, or a positive. I have a good time!” And I really honestly did. “So, it’s not like it’s a bad thing, being someone people want to have sex with!”

“How could they?” Sam asked.

I stared at him for a moment. What? Huge ego boost, thanks best friend.

“I mean… I get why someone would want to…” His face did that flustered thing, all dimples and blinking and slightly flushed cheeks. “Obviously anyone would want to have sex with you…”

Now that was an ego boost. Bona fide super hottie Sam Winchester was a little blushy about the thought of sex with me.

"But, how could anyone treat you like that's all you are? There's so many reasons why someone could be in love with you.” He sounded more agitated than I’d ever been about the issue. “You're smart and you're funny and so kind to everybody. As your friend, I'm offended that people wouldn't love you."

Sam was such a sweetie, how could I not hug him?

“I'm offended too," I said. I realised it was after midnight and this was a good breaking point in the conversation for me to get up and go to my own bed. Or the floor. Whatever.

"It hurts,” I admitted. “But never mind. There are way worse things that happen to other people! I'm still alive and I have wonderful friends and my Dad to love me."

I stood up and a massive yawn came out of my mouth all of a sudden. It was definitely time for sleep. There were spare pillows in the cupboard, like most motels. I went and grabbed one, then went to go roll out my bedroll. The silly thing was very uncooperative sometimes, but I managed to get it to roll out flat and stay flat, which was always an achievement worth celebrating.

When I was done, Sam handed me my own blanket. You can’t always guarantee getting one in every motel, and it was nice to have something of my own. Gave every motel floor more of a homey vibe.

I had just about enough energy left to stretch up onto my toes and thank Sam with a kiss on the cheek.

“Thankyou, Sam,” I said. “For listening, I mean. And not judging me.”

“Thankyou too.” He grabbed me by the waist and pulled me into a side-to-side hug, squeezing me almost tight enough to snap me.

See? Who needs romance. I had the best best friend in the whole world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have an exam on November 8th, and then I am doing NaNoWriMo for the remainder of November. To make sure I focus on study, and then my novel, I’ve finished this chapter for y’all.
> 
> Then tomorrow sometime, I’ll have a Special Chapter ready. I'll be posting it to Tumblr. It is called “According To Plan”. I hope it’s good enough that y’all will forgive me having 6ish weeks on hiatus. Stay tuned! <3


	91. Chapter 90: Countdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean’s contract is up in 3 weeks. But zombies sound like a fun distraction, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My long hiatus is at an end!!! I was hoping to head back in with a truly awesome chapter. But this is okay, and I hope it suffices!

It’d be nice to have a dog or something. A very energetic cat, even, or a goat. Goats are pretty active, right?

As it was, I had to go traipsing in the forest all alone. Every time we rocked up in a new location, I had to go wandering. I’d stay within eyesight of the cabin or shack, but out of earshot. One of the boys would put this bright orange rag in a tree outside when it was safe for me to go back.

That was usually after long, dull hours of lonely reflection. A goat would have been some company, or at least given me something else to think about. Instead, I fought to keep my thoughts on anything other than what the boys were doing.

The first time, I’d lasted a whole half hour, before I ran away to vomit. The second time, I tried again, but one scream and I was out. I couldn’t handle it.

We didn’t actually know whether the possession victim could feel it. Holy water made demons thrash and scream in pain. The victim was in there somewhere, usually pretty dead already. I had rarely seen someone still alive five minutes after the exorcism. Maybe the holy water only hurt the demon who was in control of the body. But maybe the victim could feel it too, another layer of burning pain over the top of the rest of the agony.

I couldn’t deal with the screaming.

It was all about saving Dean, finding out who this demon was that held his contract, so we could break the deal. We had only three weeks left. I was working on my plan to bring Dean back from Hell after the event, but without any luck so far. I couldn’t do anything while I was wandering around a forest to escape the screams of the next demon.

So I just had to sit there, with trashy books I’d buy at gas stations, and wait for my less squeamish friends to finish torturing someone. I’d feel guilty the whole time, every time. But Dean didn’t seem to be hurt or angry about it. He even offered to let me take his Baby and go somewhere else, get supplies or something. But I wanted to stay close, just in case things turned bad and they needed me.

I was reading an entertainingly ridiculous romance novel. It was one of those books written for the conservative middle-aged woman who liked to think she was being a bit racy. No sex scenes, but sometimes the heroine dared to admire the hero’s glistening pecs. It was always some exciting but ludicrous scenario: he was protecting her from pygmy bandits deep in the jungle, or he was an arrogant and surprisingly ripped multibillionaire single father and she was the young and naive virginal nanny.

This one was about a young and naive virginal college student (they were always young, naive and virginal). While working her summer job at a fancy hotel, she falls in love with a bellboy, but doesn’t know he’s really the hotel’s owner, a handsome Prince from a fictional tiny European nation.

I had just finished a scene where he had to jump into the hotel pool to rescue a small boy from drowning. And surprise surprise… glistening pecs. I folded down the page corner, so I could read it to the boys later. They both enjoyed the absurdity.

“Don’t think I can’t see you drooling, Princess! What is he, a sexy pirate?”

I laughed, looking up to see Dean a short distance away. I was sitting on a ridge, where I was able to look down at the cabin. Dean had obviously seen me from below and come up.

“Secret Prince!” I called down. “Is it…”

“You can come back,” he called. “Buried the poor guy.”

I didn’t need telling twice. I put the book in my little backpack and threw it down for him to catch, with expert hunter reflexes. Then I scooched forward to where the slope began and let gravity do the rest. On my feet and butt, I slid down to the next flat. Then it was a small but sheer drop, another slide and a jump.

Dean got out of the way as I picked up pace on the final slide. I managed to rise as I hit the bottom, so I was standing upright.

“Show off,” Dean smirked, giving me my bag.

There was a water bottle in there, so I got it out and took a big gulp, before offering it to him.

“He talk?” I asked, as he drank.

Dean gave me my bottle back, with a shake of his head. “Nah. Apparently whoever has my contract is scarier than we are.”

I sighed and shouldered my bag, letting him lead the way down to the cabin.

 

* * *

 

 

When we got back, Sam was pacing the dingy “living room”, on the phone. He was probably pacing to avoid sitting on the couch, which looked like it had been slathered in dog food and then exposed to a hoard of ravenous wolves. It was about 90% tears and holes.

But it was somewhere to sit, and softer than the ground I’d spent all day on. I flopped onto it as he finished his call.

“Okay. Yeah, I’ll tell the Lieutenant.”

He hung up, looking immediately to Dean. “Bury the body?”

“Yeah,” said Dean. “Looks like these demons ride’em hard, just for…” He suddenly hesitated, his eyes flickering over to me as he realised what he was saying. “For kicks,” he finished, grabbing two bottles of beer from the six pack on the table.

He passed one to me, while opening the other for himself.

“So what are you telling the Lieutenant?” I asked “Can I be the Lieutenant?”

Dean scoffed, falling down onto the couch beside me, heavily, but not so roughly as to risk spilling his beer. He was exhausted.

“I’m clearly the Lieutenant,” he said.

As if!

“I think you’re more of an underling. You’re that detective who refuses to go by the book, and I’m always hauling your ass in and threatening to take your badge.”

He smirked. “You’re always mad, cos you’re hiding that you’re secretly into me.”

Sam was still standing in the middle of the room, waiting to answer my question. Apparently he’d waited long enough, as the moment there was a gap while Dean and I were both downing beer, he dived right in.

“So remember that thing in the paper yesterday?”

“Stripper suffocates dude between thighs?” asked Dean.

“Get the _vice_ squad on that shit,” I said, holding up my right hand.

Dean obligingly raised his own palm and gave me the high five I didn’t deserve for such lame punnery.

Sam was just watching us, pretending impatience, but I was sure I saw the little hint of a smile, though he tried to hide it. “The other thing.”

It was pretty difficult to forget. “That guy who walks into the ER with his stomach missing?”

“His liver, actually,” Sam said. “Anyways, I just found out something pretty damn interesting.”

Dean and I just drank our beers, faces expectant. Clearly Sam was stalling for dramatic effect.

“The dead body was covered in bloody fingerprints. Not the victim’s.”

“Okay, great,” Dean said. “My man Dave Caruso will be stoked to hear it.”

His nonchalance was fair enough. Somebody had to take the guy’s liver out. It wasn’t likely he did it himself, so the prints would belong to someone else. That was a given.

“Those fingerprints match a guy who died in 1981.”

Dean and I both stopped, bottles halfway to our mouths, leaning forward. Okay. Colour me intrigued.

“Ooh!” I squeaked, but Dean himself was interested enough to let it pass.

“So what are we talking? Uh, walking dead? Walking, killing dead?”

“Maybe,” Sam said, with a shrug.

He pulled the crappy little wooden chair away from the table and dragged it out. Then he straddled it, leaning forward against the back of the chair.

“Zombies do like the other white meat,” Dean said, giving attention to his beer again. “Speaking of. What do you care about zombies?”

“What do you mean?” asked Sam.

“Well you’ve been on soul-saving detail for months now,” Dean pointed out. “And we’re three weeks out, and all of a sudden, you’re interested in some hot zombie action?”

Sam’s eyes flickered to me, and then back to Dean again in mere milliseconds. “Hey man, you’re the one who’s been all gung-ho to hunt. I just thought I’d be doing you a favour.”

Dean got to his feet, his beer forgotten in his hand again. “Hey, no no no no, I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it, okay. I mean, obviously I want to hunt some zombies!”

“Okay, fine, whatever,” said Sam.

Dean had a point. Sam wasn’t sleeping. He was worrying about Dean’s contract being up in less than a month. He had nightmares, and maybe his heavy-sleeping brother didn’t know that, because he kept it quiet and low key. But I knew.

So, why was he suddenly steering us in a totally different direction? Maybe he just wanted Dean to fulfill his zombie-killing dreams. But he also sounded kinda defensive to me. Like maybe there was an agenda and I was missing it.

But with the packing up and getting back into the car almost right away, I didn’t have any chance to ask. Dean drove. I read the boys some of my hilariously self-conscious romance novel. We stopped for fries. And by the time we got to Vermont, I’d forgotten about it.

 

* * *

 

While the Winchesters got their FBI on, speaking to the coroner and looking at the body, I waited outside. While I loved most aspects of the hunting gig, nothing would ever make me regret not having to put on a damn suit and look respectable. Respectable is for people with hair that doesn’t have its own zipcode.

I was leaning against the car, reading an email from Jo, when they came out.

“Well?” I asked, looking up. “Zombies?”

“Nope,” said Sam, sounding pretty cheerful about it. He didn’t want to fight zombies? Who doesn’t want to fight zombies?

“Could be,” said Dean. “Zombies with skills. Dr Quinn, Medicine Zombie.”

“What?” I asked, the three of us piling into the car.

“So, this guy’s liver wasn’t eaten or torn out,” Sam explained. “It was removed. Surgically.”

I settled into the middle of the back seat, poking my head between the two Winchesters. “Wow. So… What?”

Surgically removed livers? What the hell kind of monster did _that_? And why? Maybe witches? They’d definitely take a guy’s liver for some gross ritual shit.

“Maybe we’re on the wrong track,” Sam said. “I don’t think we should be looking for hacked up corpses.”

“What should we be looking for?” asked Dean.

“Survivors. This isn’t zombie lunch. This is organ theft.”

 

* * *

 

 

Despite Dean’s disappointment at a lack of ravenous zombies, he still agreed there was a case to work. We ate dinner at a diner, and he checked the local paper for potential survivors. He found one.

This guy had been abducted and had one of his kidneys removed. He was going to recover. Or at least, physically. God knows how fucked up he was going to be mentally. Imagine waking up in an icy bathtub with an organ missing. It sounded horrific, and it made me really hope that whatever had attacked _was_ supernatural. Otherwise, we’d have to leave things to the cops, and I wouldn’t get to slaughter the damn thing myself.

We checked into a super shitty motel and got a good night’s sleep before Sam and Dean headed out to question the victim. I stayed behind. Zombies or not, I was still looking into my plan to help Dean. I was sure I was onto something. I didn’t want him to go through the horror of being dragged to Hell by invisible hounds. But we had three weeks left, and I was convinced it would be much easier to get him out of Hell than to stop him going.

My research had led me to a website about ancient pre-Christian concepts of Hell and punishment. They described rituals that were supposed to rescue a soul that had been cursed to suffer torment in the afterlife. It was some super complex stuff, but it sounded legit. Just because they didn’t call it Hell, didn’t mean it couldn’t theoretically be the same place. Cursed to suffer torment was pretty much what a Crossroads Deal meant.

I was still reading when the boys got back. Kidney guy had not been much help. He was too traumatised, and pretty fixated on the pain. Whatever this thing was, it had cut into him while he was awake and he’d felt every moment of it before he finally passed out. He was reluctant to talk about it and angry at them for asking. I didn’t blame him.

“Poor guy,” I said. “Is he gonna be okay? Without his kidney, I mean. Doesn’t he need it?”

Sam shook his head, sitting down on the other side of the table and opening up his laptop. “Not really. You can have a normal life with only one. That’s why people donate them. You need one, but most people can get by without the second. It’s kind of like a spare tyre. He’ll just need to have a check up a bit more often.”

I didn’t know that. I figured you just had as many organs as you needed to have. “Well, I guess that’s something. It’s more than the liver guy got.”

Dean was trying to read over my shoulder, so I closed my laptop up. He wouldn’t have seen much, but I didn’t want him to guess at what I was doing. Besides which. It’s rude.

“Okay,” he said, walking away and pretending like he hadn’t been looking. “So, whatever this guy is, he’s not just after one organ. Werewolves take the heart. Kitsunes eat some gland, don’t they? What do we got that’s not choosy?”

“I was thinking maybe a witch,” I said. “Guy could be a doctor, taking organs for some creepy witch business.”

Dean gave an exaggerated shudder. “Freakin’ witches,” we said, in unison.

Sam shook his head. “I dunno. Maybe. I think I might be onto something.” He looked at his watch. “Just give me half an hour to check some stuff…”

“Maybe we should go get lunch,” I said. “I saw a burger place a couple streets over.”

With a nod, Dean reached for his keys right away. Maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed like he’d been increasingly less willing to do the reading and research. I figured maybe he was feeling more and more like time was running out. He didn’t seem to sit still at all anymore. I could totally understand why he felt so fidgety. He was always a guy inclined to enjoy life. With an actual countdown over his head, he must have been counting every wasted moment.

“Sam seem kinda weird to you?” Dean asked, as we drove out of the motel lot.

I shook my head. “Not really.” Then I remembered the previous day. How he’d suddenly decided to go from hunting down Dean’s contract to catching zombies. That must have been what Dean was referring to. “I guess… I was a little surprised by his sudden change of focus. But he still seems like Sam to me.”

Dean was hesitant, like he was trying to make himself believe me. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

Sometimes it was okay to bring it up and sometimes it wasn’t. I was wary, because I could never quite tell.

“I think maybe… he’s kinda twitchy, you know. He’s getting desperate and he doesn’t know what to do.”

It must have been okay because he didn’t snap or snarl at me. He just sighed. “He’s gotta be okay. You gotta make sure he’s okay, Ellie.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I said, for what was maybe the fifteenth time. “I will, I promise.”

 

* * *

 

 

We brought Sam back a salad, but he was super focused when we got in, so I shoved it into the crummy little motel fridge for him. But Dean and I were good to go. As he took another five minutes to finish whatever he was reading, we started unwrapping our food.

“Okay. So I got a theory,” he said at last.

“Yeah?” I said. We knew that. Get to the point, Sam!

“Yeah. I talked to Mr. Giggle’s doctor,” he said, referring to the (justifiably) grumpy kidney guy from the morning. “Turns out his incisions were sewn up with silk.”

“That’s weird,” Dean said, stating the obvious through a mouthful of burger.

“Yeah, nowadays it is,” Sam agreed. “But silk used to be the suture of choice back in the early 19th century. It was really problematic. Patients would get massive infections. The death rate was insane.”

“Good times,” I said, in between mouthfuls, because I am not an animal and who talks while they’re chewing, Dean, gross!

“Right,” Sam went on. “So doctors, they had to do whatever they could to keep infections from spreading. One way was maggots.”

Dean was not chewing anymore. “Dude. We’re eating.”

“It actually kind of worked because maggots, they eat bad tissue, and they leave good tissue. And get this: when they found our guy, his body cavity was stuffed full of maggots!”

“Dude! I’m eating!” Dean reiterated, and Sam gave just the hint of a smile.

“Okay,” I said, cutting in before Dean was violently ill on the table right beside me. “So, you’re saying someone did surgery on this guy, but it was like, 1800s style?”

“Yeah,” Sam said.

Dean was still holding his burger, but he’d stopped eating. “Hang on. A little _Antiques Roadshow_ surgery, some organ theft. Why is this all sounding familiar?”

It didn’t sound familiar to me. This was some Frankenstein shit, except he used a whole corpse for his monster, and didn’t steal organs from random guys who were just trying to feed the parking meter.

“Because you heard it before,” Sam explained. “When you were a kid. From Dad. Doc Benton, real life doctor, lived in New Hampshire. Brilliant, and obsessed with alchemy, especially how to live forever. So, in 1816, Doc abandons his practice and…”

I saw the light go on in Dean’s head. “Right, yeah! Nobody hears from him for like twenty years, and all of a sudden, people start showing up dead.”

“Dead or… or missing an organ or the hand or some other kind of part.”

I was just listening in fascination. This was not a story I had ever heard, but it was creepy as hell.

“Cause whatever he was doing was actually working,” Dean said. “He just kept on ticking. Parts would wear out, he’d replace them.”

Would it be inappropriate to say “cool”? Cos it was pretty cool. Super gross, but still cool.

“But I thought Dad had hunted him down and took his heart out?” Dean went on.

Sam nodded. He’d obviously already thought about that. “Yeah. I guess the Doc must have plugged in a new one.”

“All right,” I said, as Dean began tucking into his burger again, the colour back in his cheeks. I’d all but finished mine. “So, where’s this creeper doing his surgeries?”

Sam nodded towards the computer. “According to this, Benton’s picky about where he sets up his lab. He likes dense forest with access to a river or stream or some kind of fresh water.”

“Why?” asked Dean.

Sam didn’t even tried to hide is little smile this time. “Because that’s were he likes to dump the bile. And intestines.” Dean gagged as he lowered his burger. “And fecal matter. Lost your appetite yet?”

 

* * *

 

 

Dean finished his burger, with somewhat less joy in his soul than he started with. And at my insistence, Sam even ate his lunch. I all but had to force him, though. Maybe Bela had a point that time. I was a little bit of a mom type.

There was no map of the area in reception, so we went out. Dean went to an internet cafe, where he could get some maps online and print them off. I went to the town’s visitors centre, and grabbed all the road maps, and some hiking ones, which even had cabins and stuff marked on them. That would help.

Meanwhile, Sam stayed at the motel, furiously reading his Dad’s journal, and trying to figure out if there was some way to find this organ-thieving sicko. It _was_ cool, but only like zombies or ghost ships are cool: interesting and exciting to hunt.

I’d walked, while Dean had driven, so he was back well before me. My big fold out maps of the local forests shat all over his printouts, though. I set them out, and Sam grabbed the thick red pen so we could circle potential locations. We’d got it pretty much sorted when my phone rang. It was my Dad.

“Hey Daddy,” I said, moving away from the guys so they could keep talking while I was on the phone. “What’s up?”

“I think I finally got a bead on Bela,” he said.


	92. Chapter 91: Tough Decisions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie is once again in the middle of a Winchester disagreement.

“I think I finally got a bead on Bela,” Dad said.

Good thing I was on the other side of the room. The boys didn’t see my involuntary little jump of excitement. “Thank God, where?”

“I don’t know. But Rufus does.”

“Uncle Rufus?” I asked. He and Dad hadn’t spoken in what, fifteen years? He’d taught Dad about hunting, but they had some kind of falling out. Just like with John Winchester, and the Howard family. But the Howards deserved it and I never liked John Winchester, so probably Uncle Rufus was in the wrong too.

“Yeah. I put the word out on Bela months ago. Rufus just called, said a woman got in touch, wanted to buy some things.”

I decided not to comment on Rufus actually choosing to call Dad and speak to him. They had a real important history and I was sure Dad had feelings about it, but he’d never tell me. “So, he thinks this woman is Bela?”

“British accent,” Dad said. “Went by the name Mina Chandler.”

“That’s one of hers,” I said. We had uncovered a whole lot of aliases over the course of our search for her. “So, he tell you anything else?”

“Nope. He wasn’t exactly chatty. Probably only called cos I’ve been saying it’s you that’s looking for Bela. Doubt he’d help me if you weren’t involved.”

Good move, suggesting it was me that wanted help. I tended to alienate people less than Dad did. Though it isn’t hard to be less alienating than my father.

“We’ll go check it out. Thanks. Where?”

“He’s in Canaan, Vermont. I’ll text you the address.”

“Great! This’ll cheer the boys up so much. We’ll get on the road and I’ll call you soon, okay?”

“Okay, sweetie. Oh. Take a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue.”

Wow. That’s some serious bribery. I hoped I didn’t have to drink it with him, cos whiskey and I are not buddies. I hadn’t had any whiskey since that time I tried to kiss Sam. I’d banned myself for life.

“Alright! Thanks Dad. Bye.”

“Bye. I’ll text you.”

I hung up and went back over to the guys, who were still leaning over the maps we’d laid out on the bed.

“Bobby got something for us?” asked Sam.

“Yeah. He’s got a guy might know where Bela is. An old friend of his, Rufus. They’re not pals anymore, but apparently he thinks it’s me asking, so he’ll help us out.”

“Rufus?” asked Sam. “Isn’t that the guy who found you when…”

When I was being sacrificed to some weird demonic ritual. Yes.

“Yeah,” I said, quick and dismissive. “Apparently Bela wants to buy something from him.”

“Great!” Dean said, heading straight for his duffle, and ready to start packing. “Where is he?”

“Canaan. In Vermont.”

“Sweet, we can make that by morning. Come on Sam.”

Sam looked up from the maps at last. “What? Whoa, whoa whoa hold on a second.”

“We gotta go,” I told him. “Who knows how long Bela will wait for whatever she’s buying?”

I was moving past Sam to get into the bathroom for my toothbrush and stuff. He grabbed hold of my arm, as I went, not hard enough to hurt, but stopping me.

“Look, I think we should stay here and finish the case.” Sam’s tone and agitated movements suggested he thought that was obvious and was stunned that we did not agree.

Dean looked up. “You insane?”

Sam’s hand tensed, tightening around my forearm, but he didn’t intend it. He was just reacting reflexively, and I knew it the next moment.

“Dean, there is _no way_ she still has the Colt! That was months ago! She probably sold it the second she got it.”

“Well, then I’ll kill her,” his brother replied, casually. “Win-win.”

I hoped he was not serious. Whatever Bela had done, and however awful she was, killing humans was not a thing we did. Well… maybe if they were a creepy immortal doctor who stole organs. But not people who were guilty only of robbing us and pissing us off. Not even people who shot Sam.

I’d happily have kicked her in the face, though.

I kept my mouth shut. This was not a moment to give my opinion. They probably wouldn’t hear me anyway.

“Dean…” Sam began, but he was cut off before he could get any further.

“Sam. We’re going!”

“No!” He let go of my arm, leaving me to take a step back and stand in the middle of the room and look from brother to brother and pray they didn’t ask for my opinion.

“Why the hell not?” Dean demanded.

“Dean!” Sam was incredulous, like Dean was deranged and maybe me too. “This, this here. Now. This is what’s gonna save you!”

“What? Chasing some Frankenstein?”

“Chasing immortality!”

_No! Oh no Sam, no! Don’t go down that road_. I prayed to whatever might listen that Sam was not going where I thought he was.

“Look, Benton can’t die,” he went on. And the hope and passion in his beautiful eyes horrified me. He looked that way when he was talking about his faith in God. Or his faith in his brother. “We find out how he did it, we can do it to you.”

I was about to open my mouth and remind Sam that this guy’s secret involved stealing innocent people’s organs. But I didn’t, cos I’m a pathetic coward. Not that he’d have listened anyhow.

“What are you talking about?” asked Dean.

“You have to die before you go to hell, right?” Sam asked. “So, if you can never die, then…”

“Wait wait wait.” Dean had lowered his voice, but it was even more urgent, as he stepped towards Sam, coming face to face with him. “Wait a second, did… did you know that this was Doc Benton from the jump?”

“No,” Sam said. And I imagined the look Dean was giving him was pretty close to my own face. Because _really?_ “Look, I was hoping…” he clarified.

“So the whole zombie thing, it was lying to me?” Dean asked.

Lying wasn’t the issue here. Dean didn’t have a leg to stand on, there. He lied to Sam plenty. Like the time he pretended Sam had never died and been resurrected. No… lying was not the issue. The issue was the idea that Dean’s life should be preserved indefinitely, and potentially at the expense of others.

“I didn’t wanna say anything until I was sure, Dean. All I’m trying to do is find an answer here.”

I sat down on Sam’s bed, too afraid to get involved. On the one hand, I thought Dean was right. This was not an option we ought to be exploring. No good would come of it. Not for Dean and not for Sam.

On the other hand, I didn’t think yelling at Sam was going to solve anything. Dean’s approach was too confrontational. This was so out of character for Sam, who would normally be totally repelled by Doc Benton’s whole organ stealing MO. He was desperate and clutching at straws - clearly not entirely in his right mind. He needed compassion, not shouting.

So, not knowing what to say to either side, I just sat there, with a sick feeling lying heavy in my stomach.

“No,” Dean said. “What you’re trying to do is chase Slicey McHackey here. And to kill him? No. You wanna buy him a freakin’ beer. You wanna study him.”

“I was just trying to help,” Sam insisted.

“You’re not helping! You forget that if I welch on this deal, you die. Guess what! Living forever is welching.”

“Fine! Then, whatever the magic pill is, I’ll take it too!”

“No,” I gasped, and they both turned to look, maybe remembering for the first time that I was there. “Oh no…”

“What is this? Sid and Nancy?” Dean asked. Then he pointed at me. “What about Ellie, huh? You just gonna leave her? And Bobby?”

That was enough to make Sam pause. He was still looking at me, his eyes that dark brown of his deepest sorrows. I tried to speak, but found I couldn’t even open my mouth, I was so upset. I tried to communicate with my face that I loved him and would be there for him, but who knew if he understood? There were tears in his eyes.

“It’s like Bobby’s been saying,” Dean continued, as Sam continued to stare at me. “We kill the demon who owns the contract and this whole damn thing wipes clean. That’s our best shot.”

That I did _not_ agree with. Killing the demon holding the contract seemed like welching to me, even more than finding immortality. How did we know there wasn’t someone else around to ensure both died, in accordance with the contract? Maybe if the contract-holding demon died, the whole thing shifted to someone else. We didn’t know enough to risk that.

Unfortunately, I was still unable to make my voice work, though I could at least open my mouth.

But Sam could speak, and he turned away from me, crossing the room, closer to his brother, and turning his back towards me for some reason.

“Even if you had the Colt, Dean, who are you gonna shoot? We have no idea who holds the ticket.”

“Well, I’ll shoot the hellhounds before they slash me up!” Dean said, all gruff and bluster. “Now are you coming or not?”

I couldn’t see his face anymore, but I could see from behind that Sam was raising his head and looking his brother in the face. “I’m staying here,” he said, comparatively softly.

Dean’s voice was still at his agitated pitch. Just below a yell. “No you’re not. Cause I’m not gonna let you wander out in the woods alone to track some organ stealing freak!”

“You’re not gonna let me?” Sam asked, his own volume going up again.

“No I’m not gonna let you,” his brother repeated.

“How are you gonna stop me?”

Dean was facing me, so I could see his face and his body language. He wasn’t intimidated or afraid, but it was like he was noticing, for the very first time, that Sam was bigger than him. He’d always had a little brother, and they’d had their differences, fought physically even, apparently. But Dean looked up at his brother, four inches taller, and broad shouldered, muscular torso. And he realised that he actually couldn’t stop him doing shit. He couldn’t physically restrain Sam, or at least, not without potentially causing injury to one or both of them.

“Look man,” Sam said. “We’re trying to do the same thing here.”

There was a long pause, as Dean looked at his brother, keeping his eyes fixed on him even as he walked sideways towards his packed duffle. “I know. But I’m going. So if you wanna stay… stay.”

Sam had turned away, but not all the way. He still wouldn’t look at me. He was just looking at the wall. He stayed that way as Dean walked past, towards the door, and then stopping beside me.

“You coming or staying, Ellie?”

Oh God. I didn’t know. Both. Neither. I didn’t want Sam to follow through on this whole Doc Benton plan. But I was in even less of a position to stop him than Dean was. So, maybe I shouldn’t let him do it alone. But what about Dean? Rufus had only agreed to help because he thought the request was coming from me. He’d known me as a little girl and he wanted to help me out. If I wasn’t there, what would happen?

Sam was a well-built, strong, fit man, and this Doc Benton was a very unpleasant character. Supposing he decided he wanted some of Sam’s organs? Safety in numbers. But still there was Dean, and his potentially more helpful plan. If Rufus wouldn’t talk to him and tell him about Bela, then we were just as stuck as before.

“I… I don’t… wait!” I said, hitting upon an idea. I stood up and hurried over to the little desk. There was one of those motel notepads and a pen there. I grabbed the pen and quickly wrote.

_Dear Uncle Rufus,_

_I’m so sorry I can’t come to meet you. It’s been so long and it means so much to me that you’re offering your help after all this time. This hunt is a bitch and I’m needed. This guy is my dear friend Dean Winchester. He’s the one who needs to find Bela. It could save his life. Please help him. If you’re in doubt, you can call me. I can vouch for him, he’s a good guy. And he might even match you drink for drink. ;)_

_Thankyou and love,_

_Ellie S._

I folded it up and handed it to Dean. “I’ll forward you the text with the address. Get a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, and give it to him as a gift from me. Tell him now I know where he is, I’ll come see him some time. Do NOT try to outdrink him. Pace yourself.”

Dean smiled. “Thanks, Princess.”

And I knew. He wasn’t thanking me for the note and the address. He was thanking me because as much as he could use my help breaking the ice with Rufus, he knew Sam needed me more. He had a tendency to be overprotective, of course… hence us being in this mess.

Dean wasn’t one to sit with his brother and talk him through his feelings. But he could tell when there were feelings that needed to be talked through. And he knew I was the gal for the job.

He got his hand on the doorknob, but then turned back to us. “Sammy… be careful.”

And that was what made Sam finally turn and look at his brother. “You too.”

Then Dean turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped out of the room. He looked back in at us for a brief moment, before shutting the door behind him.

And it was just Sam and me. I watched the closed door for a moment, but it wasn’t going to make a difference. I couldn’t go with him, however much I wanted to. Maybe I should have gone, and left him to stay with Sam?

No. Dean was made for drinking whiskey with a crotchety old hunter. I was made for holding Sam and talking him down from… from whatever the hell this was.

I watched him drop down onto his bed, sitting suddenly and with enough force to make him bounce back up slightly. He exhaled so loudly as he did, I thought the neighbours might hear it. But when I came over to sit beside him, he got right up again.

“Sam…” I started.

Without even looking at me, he walked away, towards the bathroom. “I can’t… I just can’t right now, okay,” he said, grabbing the door to the bathroom and starting to close it behind him. “I can’t.” I just overheard his next bizarre sentence, though I’m sure I wasn’t meant to. “Not with you.”

What the hell did that mean?

* * *

After forwarding the address from Dad to Dean, I looked over the maps again. Sam was still shut away with his (doubtless agonised) thoughts. Listening to the sound of water running, I started figuring out a route we could take, in order to get around to all the different cabins and shacks that were potential hideaways for our creepy quarry.

It made sense to check the places closest to the water first, although that was problematic, because the roads and tracks didn’t line up along the river. So to check every location down beside the river meant driving past the turnoffs and trails that led to other possible candidates. Then we’d have to go back around and get those too.

I did my best to put together a route that combined prioritising the most likely sites and minimising the need to backtrack or repeat ourselves. Still with one ear out, I got a blue marker to draw out the path. I was halfway done when I heard the water switch off inside the bathroom.

Hesitating, I tried to decide what demeanour I should adopt when Sam came out. He didn’t want to talk to me about what had just happened. He’d made that very clear to me, though I didn’t at all understand why.

Maybe because Dad and I hadn’t looked after Dean properly? He’d been aggressive in his grief, and told us to leave so we did. We should have refused, stuck around with him to make sure he was okay, whether he wanted us or not. Then he couldn’t have done that stupid deal. Sam did get kinda testy with me one time, but then he’d apologised and said he knew it wasn’t my fault. But maybe, with things getting so dire, his mind had been going down that way again?

Perhaps Sam needed someone to blame, and I was easier than Dean?

Deciding to go with the professional, all business approach, I was just finishing off my route. When the door opened, I glanced up at Sam and then down at my map again.

“Okay, so you marked thirteen potential hideouts. I’ve figured out a route that lets us check the first eleven as efficiently as possible. The other two are more isolated, so we can either take a chance and check them first, or leave them for last.”

Obviously picking up on the mood I was putting down, Sam came straight over to look at the map, spread out on the table in front of me.

“Well, _that_ one,” he pointed to one of the two remote huts, “looks like a hell of a climb. Doesn’t seem likely he’s dragging unconscious victims up that kind of incline.”

“And bringing them back down after,” I agreed. “It’d be more efficient to go somewhere off road, so no one would stumble on him, but still easy enough for him to access.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed.

“And the other one is so far out, it’s technically over the county line. There’s two other towns closer than here, see? So I don’t think that’s likely, either.”

He nodded. “Good point. So, what are you thinking, start up here?” I nodded, as he pointed to the big X I’d drawn over the first stop. “And then around, along the ridge and back up?”

“Yep. What do you think, though? If we leave now, we won’t get them all before dark. So, do you think we should swing over just this half, and then start again in the morning? Or keep searching all night?”

“How about we start now and make a decision when it starts getting dark?”

I agreed, and grabbed my water bottle, as he started to shrug his jacket on. There was a rental car place two blocks over, so we could easily walk there. We’d have to use one of my fake credit cards, though. Unlike Sam, I could actually use my real name without showing up in police databases. But I always kept fake cards, because you don’t want to be paying for stuff in your own name if shit’s gonna go down. Fake cards are dishonest but they’re untraceable.

* * *

Our first five stops were no-go. Except for a family camping at the fourth one. They were nice people, but like… _super_ nice. Like a horror movie robot family who almost have the hang of impersonating humans. It was getting dark, and they said we could stay the night in their cabin. There would even be smores and ghost stories.

Personally, I didn’t think I’d invite two shady-looking strangers to stay overnight in my cabin, but maybe I’m just a cynic with trust issues…

But anyway, by the time we got to the sixth stop, it was fully dark. The trek from the road to the cabin was comparatively short compared to the others. It was less than twenty minutes before my torch light shone onto the beams of the roof.

“This doesn’t look remote enough,” Sam said.

“Yeah, but the stream runs right beside,” I replied, moving my torch to show him. “Besides… the guy’s what, like two hundred years old? I’m guessing he doesn’t do that much cardio. Maybe this is all the walking he can handle.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re… what was that?”

“What?” I whispered.

Sam had stopped walking, eliminating the crunch of twigs under his heavy frame. I stopped too, and listened with him.

“I thought I heard… Never mind let’s just… be careful, okay?”

We were getting close to the little cabin. Maybe Sam had just heard the rustle of some animal in the undergrowth. But also, maybe Doc Benton was up the hill, about to head out and hunt him some new body parts. I thought Sam would be a pretty tantalising prospect. Guy as big and athletic as him would probably have a good strong heart. And who wouldn’t want his beautiful eyes?

What part of me would someone want to harvest for their personal use? One time, I had found some extremely risque jean shorts and tried them out to get one up on Dean. He told me to put some damn pants on, because my thighs were “obscene” and equivalent to nuclear warfare.

How often did the Doc get hold of a good pair of thighs? How often did he need new thighs? Was it just organs he needed to replace? Skin should just regenerate, right? What about muscle? Did it last forever, or would it eventually just die and need replacing?

This guy was super sick, and I needed to get Sam the hell away from him and his gross dream of immortality. Dean was right. It wasn’t worth saving him - not this way.

It was your classic creepy cabin in the woods sorta scenario. If we weren’t being stealthy I would have bet Sam fifty bucks that we’d found the right place. The other places had been rustic and simple, but they looked nice. They were mostly in good repair, they were clean, and the areas around them were maintained. They were owned and rented. This cabin was for sure abandoned. There were large gaps between the slats, the wood was rotting in places, and everything was overgrown. Another twenty years and the whole building would have been reclaimed by the woods.

It made me think of Sleeping Beauty, sleeping in her castle, as the forest grew up around her. And of awful horror movies, I guess.

I stopped, looking at the overgrowth. There were bushes and brown twigs and rocks all over the place, but someone had made a path. Not on purpose, I didn’t think, but like somebody had walked the same route repeatedly, kicking up the roots and crumbling the leaves. Or… maybe dragged someone?

Sam was behind me, so when I stopped, so did he. I pointed to the track and mimed myself dragging a body along it. He understood me immediately, and nodded.

When we were alone, Sam and I had our own system. I would be in front, because I’m quick, while he would walk behind. That way, he could see over my head. If Doc Benton (or anything else) jumped out at us, my reflexes would deliver a brutal kick to the chest before my brain even registered his presence. Then Sam had an extra second to get his gun.

I went up to the door and tried to see through the almost-disintegrated mesh window. The room inside was dark, but with Sam’s torchlight shining over my shoulder, I could just about see inside. There was definitely a couch shape and what looked like a solid surface or two. Our light didn’t appear to rouse anyone inside. At least, I couldn’t see or hear anyone moving.

With Sam’s warm bulk directly behind me, I pushed the door open and stepped inside. We did a quick torch sweep, me low, him high, to make sure the room was empty.

My initial view had been right. There was some furniture, all of it in disrepair, and only slightly more together than the dangerously unsound building. It looked like someone was for sure living there. I stepped away from Sam to look at a little bureau thing. The drawers were collapsing, but the dust along the top was disturbed. Someone had been putting things on top of it, and then moving them, sweeping dust away as they did.

Sam, meanwhile, was looking at the contents of a desk. I watched him grab something and put it in the pocket on the inside of his jacket.

I didn’t want him to keep any of this organ harvesting lunatic’s belongings. But it wasn’t a good time to argue or confront him about it. Especially not since the next thing caught in my torchlight was the clear outline of a door flap built into the floor. Surely that led to a cellar. And that’s where I’d do _my_ sick non-consensual surgeries. In a creepy cellar.

I shone my torch towards Sam’s face, to get his attention. It worked, and when he turned to face me, his own light fell on the door, just as mine had. He came over to join me immediately.

We lifted the door together, and I had to crouch down to see past the floorboards in front of me. There were steps leading downward, but no headroom. I had to get onto the ground and take each step while in a squat. Thank god for my offensive thighs! They were good for more than just frustrating Dean.

It was so squished I wasn’t sure I’d make it down, let alone Sam. But then I saw what was down there.

The ceiling eventually levelled out into a low room. There were weird chains and broken shelves. There were so many vials, and those big round glass bottles that look like they should hold magic potions. Also, I thought I saw tools of some kind, but I was too distracted to take them in properly.

There was a bed. With wheels. It looked like an old fashioned kind of hospital gurney. Someone was lying on it, their head and shoulders visible under the blood soaked white sheet draped over them.

I straightened up and crept closer, able to hear Sam’s breath as he made his way down the cramped steps too. The man on the table wasn’t moving, and my hopes weren’t high that I’d feel a pulse. There was so much blood.

When I reached out to his neck, there was no movement. He was cold and still. Dead. I looked over at Sam, as he finished the stairs and straightened himself back out. I shook my head.

His brow crinkled, and his tongue moved inside his mouth as he took in the gory, macabre scene. It was sickening, even for me. I’d seen plenty of monsters, but there was something about the place. The old fashioned bottles, the man with the white sheet - so clinical. And the anatomic sketches I was only just noticing pinned to the walls. I could see by subtle movements of his face that Sam found it just as unnerving.

I was happy about that, even as I was scared and grossed out. That poor dead man, lying abandoned in a creepy makeshift surgery… _that_ was what trying to live forever would cost.

There was a noise. Just the lightest exhalation of breath that had me gripping tighter to my torch and reconsidering my decision not to carry a gun. The Doctor was in.

But as I whirled around to look back at the stairs, leg muscles twitching, Sam nudged me. He had his torch beam directed across more bloodsoaked white sheets. They were hanging down, like curtains. We could see through a gap that another figure was within, lying down. That was the source of the quiet moaning.

I moved back into formation, holding back the sheet to go through first.

This victim was a woman, lying prone just like the poor dead man. She was alive, and she wasn’t the only thing in the room that was. Maggots were crawling over her arm. Beneath them, a large patch of skin had been removed. Skillfully, and with surgical precision, the poor woman had been robbed of her own skin. What Sam had told us earlier made some sense of it. Doc Benton obviously kept using maggots as a way of getting rid of dead tissue, but keeping the good stuff intact. Sam had even told me that apparently this was being revived as a treatment for the twenty-first century. In sterile, clinical conditions, of course. Not in a disgusting old cabin in the middle of nowhere.

She was tied down - arms, legs and even a thick strap across her forehead. The moans were definitely hers, but she was unconscious. Probably better off that way, let’s be real. I put down my torch and reached out to check her pulse, so I could get some idea of her condition. She was much less injured than the man on the other side of the curtain.

As soon as I touched her, she opened her eyes and started to whimper, struggling at her binds as she did. It sounded like she was trying to scream, but didn’t have the breath for it.

“Hey, it’s alright,” I told her, petting her hair with one hand, while I used my other to put a finger to my lips. If the Doc was still around, she needed to stay quiet. He didn’t seem to be in the cabin, but he might well have been nearby. “Shh… shh. It’s okay. We’re here to help. It’s alright.”

It wasn’t alright. I mean, a creepy mad scientist had started to flay her alive, but that’s just what you gotta say in these situations.

I kept stroking her hair and miming quiet, while Sam had the quick thinking to grab a towel from the bench beside us. It was probably dirty and germ-ridden, but we needed something to protect her arm. It was open down to the muscle. She started to scream louder as he used it to brush off the maggots. Just the contact with her open flesh must have been agony for her. He started to wrap it around her arm, while I tried to keep her quiet and undo the strap holding her head down.

But no amount of miming and reassuring noises was going to make it hurt her any less.

The floorboards above us creaked, and she wailed. She was even _trying_ to be quiet. I could see it in her eyes, and hear her straining herself, desperate not to make a noise, but she just couldn’t help it.

The creaking was louder. I looked up through the boards above my head, and saw a light.

So I did the only thing I could think of and put my hand over her mouth. I kept my eyes on hers, hoping she’d be able to see my intention through them, and understand that I wasn’t trying to suffocate her. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she thought I was. Not after what she’d been through.

The light moved the other way, and Sam reached across us both to get at the straps holding her arms down. The floorboards were still creaking and unless Dean had suddenly changed his mind and decided to rescue us, it had to be Doc Benton.

Looking up to check Sam’s progress, I saw it. There was a window. It was boarded over, but I could see the moonlight through the cracks. It wasn’t a huge opening, but it was big enough for Sam. If he could get through, I could help the victim up after him and then climb up. But quickly.

I nudged Sam and pointed. He looked up too, and stood beside the boarded hole in the wall. At least the low ceiling meant the window was easy to access. He reached up, and as a very loud creak screeched above us, he used it to cover the sound of his elbow cracking the wood.

It took him two more carefully timed hits before he had the boards broken and the hole accessible.

I gestured at him to go through, while I helped our poor victim onto her feet. Now that no one was putting any pressure on her arm, she had gotten used to the pain level enough to stop screaming, but with every step it was obvious she was in agony.

Sam was already up there and reaching his hands back through the window, as we made it to him. She’d have to go through head first. I boosted her up so that Sam could get his hands up under her armpits and hoist her through. With me to hold her up on my end, he managed it easily.

And just as her legs were disappearing, I heard the door to the cellar.

“Run,” I hissed.

“Ellie…” Sam tried to object, but he was cut off by the woman’s moan of pain.

“Go,” I insisted. Wasn’t any point in me climbing up now. There were footsteps on the stairs and I was caught either way. No sense in everyone getting caught. Sam would be able to come back for me.

It’s not heroism. It’s just common sense.

I could hear him hesitating, as a soft light fell on the white sheets surrounding me.

Sam’s arm came through the window, like he was ready to boost me up.

Fine then.

I ran out from behind the curtain, heavy torch in hand.

And that’s when I saw his face. Patches of skin sewn together like leather. All slightly different skin tones, so he looked like he was wearing part of a mask like the phantom of the opera. His silver hair was back behind his ears, and so I could see where they’d been stitched on. The eyes were the worst. Dark and cold.

“Yep I’m here!” I screamed as I ran towards him. “Come at me, ya freak!”


	93. Chapter 92: Monsters

My head ached so much I couldn’t open my eyes. It was emanating from my forehead, spreading out all through my brain and my face. I immediately thought about the time I’d cracked my skull open. Anything but that again. I wasn’t prepared to lie in bed for six weeks, bored out of my damn aching mind.

With my eyes squished shut tight, I started to wake up properly and go back over what had happened. Sam and I found Doc Benton’s cabin. We went in, and found a dead guy and a live woman. But then the Doc himself showed up, so I made Sam take the woman through the window while I created a diversion.

By running directly at the Doc, yelling at him.

Okay, so… I think by this point, we’re all aware that I am not exactly a genius. Sometimes you gotta think in the spur of the moment and just run with whatever stupid-ass thing comes into your mind.

Then there’d been a hell of a fight. He’d known I was there, of course, having already seen my silhouette as he came down the stairs. But he was taken by surprise when I started running at him. That gave me time for a solid kick in the chest that sent him hurtling backwards.

The guy was like _super_ old. But apparently not old enough to be an easy ass-whooping. I was able to get out my little pink knife, and that gave him some trouble. He’d be needing even more new skin, after what I’d done to his face, neck and arm.

He fought back, and in that cramped little cellar, there was plenty of opportunity for us to back each other into the walls. Then there’d be a moment and the balance would turn and back we’d go.

Until he found the shovel.

In my defence, there is not a lot you can do when a guy smacks you in the head with a shovel. I was in a confined space, without much opportunity to duck and weave. And he caught me by surprise.

So… I was lying somewhere hard and flat. I could feel the cold, solid surface under my back. Metal, probably. That made sense, because my captor used those old fashioned gurneys. I’d seen them.

I tried to move each arm and leg, as well as arch my back. As predicted, everything was strapped down good and tight. Escape was not going to be easy. A pair of handcuffs and I’m as good as gone, but there’s not a lot to be done with leather straps. My best bet was to keep pulling with my strong left arm and try to weaken the strap at each end. If I put enough strain on it, it was possible I could pull free.

Next thing was to listen. Ignoring the pain, I focused my mind on audio. There were no footsteps in the room, as far as I could tell. No signs of anyone moving. There was definitely something above me. There were high-pitched creaks and deep-sharp sounds, gone faster than a finger click. I was probably in the cellar, which meant I was hearing someone walking in the cabin above. That must have been why I couldn’t hear the organ-harvesting freak moving in the room with me.

Then there was a groan. It was a distinct, clear, human-made sound. Male, probably. Someone was in pain, and very close by.

“Hello?” I whispered, hoping they were so close they’d hear me. I still wasn’t game to open my eyes to the light around me.

“Ellie?”

Seriously? It was Sam. _What the hell, Sam, this is not how you rescue._

“Sam? He caught you too?”

“Yeah.”

He and I had been tied up and held captive by monsters at least three times in three months. We volunteered to be vampire bait, to get into a nest in Michigan. Then again, when we were caught by that crocotta in Ohio. And all three of us were tied to chairs, as a temporary setback, while dealing with a shifter in Nebraska.

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” I whispered. “People will start to talk.”

Well, I found myself amusing, even if Sam didn’t.

“I can’t see you from here. Are you okay?” he asked, all serious voice.

“My head hurts like a bitch, but far as I can tell, I’ve got all organs accounted for. What are you doing here?”

“I was coming back for you,” he said.

Nice one, dude. Now we’re both organ donors.

“And you got caught?”

“Yeah,” he said, with rather a forceful grunt behind it.

“Like… five minutes after me, or what?”

“An hour, maybe,” he said. “I got Megan to the hospital, then went back to the motel for supplies. Called Dean on my way out to the car and then… he was in the carpark. Hit me with a shovel…”

At least I wasn’t alone in the excruciating headache thing. “Hurts like hell, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, with a sigh. “Do you think you can get free?”

I had been trying throughout our conversation. I was pulling upward with my left arm and forcing movement side to side as much as I could. Leather doesn’t break easy, but the strap would have a weakness somewhere.

“Maybe. Depends how old this strap is. It’s pretty strong. You?”

“No,” he said. “Um… my eyes are taped open.”

“Huh?” I asked, wrenching my arm upward again. It felt like it gave a little.

“My eyes,” Sam said. “I can’t close them. There’s something holding them open.”

Hadn’t I thought to myself that Sam’s beautiful eyes were well worth stealing? I’m not a superstitious person, but I wondered if I’d somehow made it happen, by thinking about it.

“We gotta get out of here,” I said, pulling up to weaken the strap again.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen, little lady.”

In between listening to Sam, frantically pulling at my straps and trying to do it all through the fog of a potential concussion, I had obviously not heard Doc Benton coming back downstairs into the basement.

I gave one last attempt to break free by kicking and flailing with all four limbs, before I felt his gross cold hand on my left wrist. He pulled to tighten the strap and it was worse than before I had started. It felt like my circulation was being cut. I could feel him leaning over me to tighten the right strap as well.

“It’s not personal, miss. You’re just wriggly and I can’t have you interrupting me.”

“I’ll interrupt your face!” I shouted.

_Interrupt his face? What the fuck, Ellie?_

He did not respond to my bizarre threat, moving down to tighten the binds on my ankles as well.

“Leave her alone,” Sam said. “Don’t touch her!”

“Shhh…” said the Doc, as the leather suddenly began to dig into the skin on my right ankle. “I’m not gonna take anything she didn’t take from me. Just a little skin. And maybe I’m gonna need her stomach. We’ll see. You’ve got a powerful kick on you, little miss.”

“Ellie!” Sam called out.

“Sa…” I couldn’t reply more than that, as the Doc pulled to tighten the strap around my chest. All the wind was squeezed out of me and I couldn’t make any sound come out of my mouth.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” the Doc said. I could tell by his steps that he was moving away from me towards Sam. “Shrill voice your girlfriend has.”

Even if my binds hadn’t been so tight, I still wouldn’t have been able to move anymore. My shallow breaths were painful, and I didn’t know if any oxygen was getting to my body. I tried to listen as the Doc spoke to Sam.

“You can relax. It’s all gonna be okay. Ain’t nothing gonna happen here that you got to worry about, Sammy. Your chances of coming out of this procedure alive? Very, very high.”

“What about Ellie?” asked Sam, before he called for me again. “If you hurt her, I’ll…”

“You think I’m some kind of monster, don’t you?” said the Doc. “Well, I got to tell you…”

But I didn’t get to find out what he wanted to tell Sam. Concentrating on his voice, thinking through my pain and getting breath into my chest was too much for my body to handle. There was fire in me, moving out from my lungs in little tendrils that burned all over.

All I could think was _“Hey… at least I’ll be unconscious when he cuts my stomach out!”_

* * *

I was eased awake slowly. There were hands holding me. One on my arm, one on my back, one in my hair. I instinctively gulped down as much air as I could, still feeling like I was suffocating.

“Hey, hey, Ellie! Ellie, it’s okay. Breathe slow.”

I knew that voice and even though I couldn’t actually piece things together properly, I definitely trusted the voice and whoever it belonged to. So I tried my best to stay calm and take a long, deliberate breath.

“That’s good,” said the voice. “In… out… in… out. Just like you taught me, remember? In…”

Out.

It was Sam talking to me. I followed along with him, breathing like he told me. In… out… The hand on my back rubbed up and down, while the one on my arm stayed steady. The one in my hair felt nice, slowly and softly petting the hair away from my face and out of my way.

Slowly, the pain eased and I was able to breathe properly without concentrating. I opened my eyes.

I was sitting up on the gurney, with a Winchester on either side. Sam was supporting my back and my arm, while Dean kept his hand in my hair.

“Hey, there she is,” said Sam.

Dean grinned. “ _I’ll interrupt your face_?”

I smiled. Not my finest comeback.

But how was Dean there? Hadn’t he gone to find Uncle Rufus and deal with Bela?

“What happened?” I asked, as Sam looked closely at my open eyes, presumably checking for concussion.

“Got here just in time to save you crazy kids,” Dean said. He pointed across to the other gurney. “Turns out immortality can’t save you from a knife dipped in chloroform.”

Crafty. A lot of people thought Dean was the brawny brother, but he was actually a real smart, creative thinker. Plus Sam also is super built, so let’s not be putting people in boxes okay?

Doc Benton was lying prone, strapped down where Sam had been. I peered over at the bindings holding him there.

“I feel like those straps could be tighter,” I said. “Guy’s immortal, right? He’s not gonna sweat a little lung crushing.”

Dean smirked again. “Ah, Princess, I love it when you get vengeful.” Now I was breathing properly, he made sure Sam had me steady and got up off the bed. “You go from Strawberry Shortcake to Kill Bill in half a second.”

“I think he’s waking up,” Sam said, letting go of me, his hands still hovering nearby in case I fell.

I was fine. I was no longer dizzy, and the pains in my head and chest had both eased. I was about to jump down from the gurney, but Sam saw me and immediately moved to stop me.

“Whoa, slow down,” he said.

He was right to stop me. There was a moment where I teetered on the edge of the gurney and I knew I’d have fallen. He grabbed either side of my waist before the worst happened.

With my hands on his shoulders and his on my waist, he was able to lift me down and make sure my feet got on the floor neatly and safely. Then he walked beside me to the other gurney. Dean was on the other side, and the three of us looked down on the monster.

He looked so frail and human, lying there. His face was made up of at least four pieces of skin, but the stitching seemed more natural than the two hastily patched up cuts I’d inflicted on his cheek and neck. His hair was silvery-grey, like any old man’s. When he opened his eyes, I saw that one was clouded from a cataract. It was clear why he needed a new one. Because of the frequent skin transplants, he was almost free of wrinkles, but somehow he still looked ancient. Perhaps it was the sad pallor. He obviously didn’t get a lot of sun. He couldn’t, what with his very identifiable face.

But he didn’t look like a monster. He just looked like an old man who’d been through some violence, his face patched up and stitched together. It wasn’t scary or inhuman. It was more sad. And I absolutely understood why Dean didn’t want to go that route, desperate though we were.

“Oh hiya, Doc,” Dean greeted him. “Wakey wakey eggs and bac-ey.”

“Please,” he said, low and weak, locking gaze with Dean.

“Please what? You’ve been killing poor bastards for over a hundred and fifty years and now you got a request? Shut up!”

Fuck yeah! Apparently Dean was not in the mood to play games. I wondered what had happened with Bela. Nothing good, judging by Dean’s expression and irritation level.

“No you don’t understand,” the Doc said, still appealing directly to Dean. “I can help you. I know what you need.”

“We might have to cut him up into little bits,” Dean said to me and Sam, ignoring Benton completely. “You know, this immortality thing is a bitch.”

“Can I keep his nose?” I asked. “If it even _is_ his nose? Doesn’t matter, I just want a nose.”

Benton’s eyes flickered from Dean to me, and I just smiled all polite, like I was meeting my date’s parents or something. His eyes immediately went back to Dean again.

“I can read the formula for you. You know, immortality… Forever young, never die.”

“Dean,” said Sam.

“Sam,” he replied.

But when Sam gestured towards the other side of the curtain, his brother began to follow him. Before they left, he caught my eye and motioned to the chloroform bottle. It was still on the low workbench alongside all the gross organ stealing instruments. There was a rag beside it. I nodded and as the boys went through the curtain and around the corner, I went to get them.

I carefully skirted around the Doc, not willing to take a chance that he’d manage to break free and grab me somehow, though it seemed unlikely. I’d been hit with a shovel and had my chest crushed til I couldn’t breathe. I was not taking any chances with this asshole.

I heard frustrated mutterings from the other side of the curtain, getting louder. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, though I tried. I opened the bottle of chloroform and poured some out onto the rag.

“To me it is, okay?” I heard Dean say. He was coming back. “Black or white. Human, not human.” He came through the curtain and neither of us even needed to speak to each other. I threw the soaked rag at him and he caught it as he came back around to Benton’s side.

Sam followed after him as Dean went on. “See, what the Doc is is a freakin’ monster. I can’t do it. I would rather go to hell.”

“You don’t understand,” Benton called out as Dean gripped the rag, leaning over him. “I can help you!”

Dean placed the rag over that lying, monstrous mouth. One of the Doc’s legs thrashed against the binding, but that was it. He was out like a candle, immune to death maybe, but not to chloroform.

“Now, I’m gonna take care of him,” Dean said. “You can either help me or not. It’s up to you.”

Sam looked at his brother, then down at the Doc’s unconscious form. Then he looked over at me. I didn’t know what he was expecting to see, so I just nodded, hoping he would understand me. This was Dean’s choice, and if he didn’t want to take that option, it wasn’t for Sam or me to object.

“Okay,” Sam said, turning back to Dean. “What are we gonna do with him?”

I was so happy, I forgot my shaky balance as I rushed over to join my two favourite brothers. I didn’t like it when they fought, and I _really_ didn’t like seeing Sam so desperate that he forgot about that strong moral code that I so admired.

We didn’t agree with Dean. It wasn’t black and white. Sam and I had agreed that monsters weren’t all monsters. But a person who chooses to be a monster? They don’t deserve our pity.

My enthusiasm made me stumble and trip, but Sam caught me, his strong hands grabbing hold of my arms, and pulling me close to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, straightening myself up. “Sorry this wasn’t the answer, I mean. But we’ve still got time.” I was speaking to Dean too, now. “There’s gotta be a way.”

Dean smiled, before turning away to look at the Doc again. “And Strawberry Shortcake’s back. Come on, Princess, we need Revenge Ellie on this.”

I looked down at what was appeared to be a helpless old man, lying unconscious before us. Like Dean had said, we could chop him up and leave him in different places. Would that kill him, or just stop him reassembling? Didn’t that amount to the same thing? And if he was immortal, where would his consciousness be while he was lying in pieces buried up and down the country? Would he be able to reflect on his crimes?

Dismemberment seemed like the easy way out, and this guy didn’t deserve it. Killing others to prolong his own worthless life? Not okay.

“We could bury him,” I suggested. “Alive, I mean. Find a box, chain him up real tight and put him six feet under.”

“What if someone digs him up?” Dean asked.

“Twelve feet?” I asked.

“We could use that shovel he hit us with,” Sam suggested.

* * *

There was a crappy old broken fridge in the cabin. We didn’t want to bury him right next to the road, so once we had him in the fridge, the boys hauled him as far as they could. We had our own shovels, of course, so we were all able to dig. We didn’t go down twelve feet, but when Sam decided to climb out of the hole, it was over his head height. It took both Dean and I to help pull him up.

There was room for him to move a little in the fridge. Because Dean’s a nice guy, he had thrown in a matchbook. It was important that the Doc be able to see his new home properly. I put a piece of bread in his pocket. Didn’t want him going hungry during eternity. Feeling like we’d adequately equipped him for his future, we got several thick chains around the fridge and padlocked them. They were so tight, there wasn’t any way to open the door.

We rolled the fridge into the hole and gazed down upon it. That oughta keep him pretty well gone, right? He wouldn’t be dug up in a hurry, and maybe if some tectonic plate movement someday brought him to the surface, he’d still be chained into a fridge. Someone on the outside would need the tools, and inclination, to break him out. And maybe by then, he’d have rethought his morals and found Jesus or whatever.

Sam grabbed the diary with the formula from his pocket and looked at it. I was hoping we could burn it or something, but watching Sam drop it into the hole brought me so much joy, I leapt towards him, holding him round the middle in an aggressive hug.

His own right arm went around my shoulder. “Thanks, Pea.”

“What for?” I asked.

“For believing I’d do the right thing eventually.”

I just squeezed him harder, my ear smooshed up against his chest so I could hear his rapid heart beat. He was obviously still recovering from the digging. And we still had to fill the damn thing in again.

“No! No! Don’t!”

Benton had woken up. His screams were muffled, but we could still understand him.

“Stop it! I can help you! No!”

“Enjoy forever in there, Doc!” Dean called back.

I let go of Sam and grabbed both of our shovels. Dean had already started to throw the earth back into the hole. Taking advantage of that elevated heart beat, Sam got straight into it as well. It took me a few seconds to get my brain organised enough to hold the shovel right.

But by the time I was scooping up the fresh dug dirt, the Doc’s screams were already drowned out. I couldn’t hear his pleading, and didn’t want to.

Sam and I knew that not all monsters are monsters.

But some are.


	94. Chapter 93: Our Poor Choices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bela has made some bad choices. And probably Dean too. But then… Ellie doesn’t always make the right call, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for my extended absence, friends!!!
> 
> But this weekend I MET JARED PADALECKI AND HE CALLED ME "SWEETIE" AND LATER ALSO "DARLIN'" AND I EAT SLEEP AND BREATHE SUPERNATURAL ONCE MORE!!!
> 
> My Minecraft binge is over. Fic writing binge has recommenced!

On our way back to the motel, Dean explained what happened with Rufus. He’d given Dean the address for Bela, along with several pages of relevant documents about her past. Apparently there’s a thing you can do with IDing a person from their ear. So a friend of Rufus’ in England had a whole lot of background.

Dean had already gone through it, of course. Her real name was Abby. Her parents died when she was fourteen, and in suspicious circumstances. Their car crashed, and Police suspected the brake line had been cut, but weren’t able to prove it. And little Abby got their money. A whole lot of money.

That explained why that vengeful spirit had gone after her in Massachusetts. It targeted people who had killed a member of their own family.

“Shoulda let that spirit take her out,” Dean said, as he finished explaining.

“Cutting her parents’ brakes at fourteen,” Sam repeated. “Wow. That’s… That’s cold.”

“She didn’t cut ‘em,” Dean went on. “I noticed something in her room. Devil’s shoestring.”

“Like for warding off Hellhounds?” asked Sam. Man had a botanical encyclopaedia in his head. He was always identifying plants from name or sight alone.

“Exactly like,” Dean said. “And guess when mommy and daddy died?”

Shit. Bela had done a deal with a Crossroads demon. “Ten years ago?”

“To the day,” Dean said. “Her time’s up.”

Sam turned in his seat to look back at me. I was in the middle, again, leaning forward to perch my head between theirs. I didn’t know what Sam’s face meant. He slightly raised one eyebrow. But maybe he was looking at my expression for some reason, rather than trying to communicate anything.

“Did she tell you why?” he asked, turning back to his brother.

“Didn’t ask. We’re talking millions, Sam. Why else?”

Maybe that’s what Sam had been trying to ask me, without words. Something about this story seemed… odd. It takes a special kind of ruthlessness to murder your parents for money before you’re even out of high school. Bela was definitely cold and hard, but she didn’t seem greedy. She was incredibly shady and she sold stolen goods. She didn’t care what was done with the dangerous occult stuff she hocked. Yes, she’d shot Sam, which I’d never forgive. But she also paid us for rescuing her from that ghost ship curse. Paid us _a_ _lot_.

She liked being rich, but I wasn’t quite sure how to reconcile a teenager so greedy she’d murder her parents in cold blood with a woman who casually threw twenty grand at us like it was nothing.

“Mighta been some other reason too,” I said. “I hate her, but I dunno… something just doesn’t seem right about that.”

“Okay, Shortcake,” said Dean, his tone like like a gentle, patronising pat on the head. “Bela’s just misunderstood and there’s a soft squishy marshmallow inside everyone.”

“Except you, asshole,” I said, throwing a heavy kick to the back of his seat.

“You said she didn’t have the Colt,” Sam cut in, carefully scooching the subject back on track before I tried to strangle Dean while he was driving. “So what happened?”

“Didn’t find the Colt, so I left. But she stole the motel receipt from my pocket.”

“Huh,” mumbled Sam. “So… she’s looking for us?”

“Or someone else is,” said Dean. “Either way, I’m thinking decoys in our beds tonight.”

Sam and I agreed with that, no question. Whether Bela bumped her parents off for money or not was irrelevant to our own situation. When someone pickpockets you to find out where you’re sleeping, best thing to do is not sleep there.

It was on the way back to the motel that Sam spotted a sex shop. Dean was all ready to joke about his little brother growing up or imply Sam had some weird fetish. But Sam pointed out that the place sold sex dolls, forcing Dean to agree that actually, that was a really great idea.

Two guys and a girl go into a shop and buy three sex dolls. I don’t know how that joke ends, but it sounds like a good start. At least, the man working the counter was amused.

It was dark by the time we got back to the motel. Dean had been in Canaan, so it was only Sam and I that needed to gather all our shit together. It was hard to make my decoy doll look right, lying on the floor, but we managed it. Without knowing whether it’d be Bela coming or someone else, and what they intended to do, we just had to take our best guess.

Dean was pretty convinced Bela was intending to kill us. She was trying to hold Hellhounds at bay, but rather than ask for help, she’d stolen the receipt to get our location. Sam and I agreed that it sure seemed like she was trying to cut some sort of deal. I wasn’t sure about killing us, though. Maybe her intention was just to give us up.

In any case, she probably wasn’t interested in killing me. I was merely a sidekick. A badass, super competent (and totally hilarious) sidekick. But not likely to be included in any plot against the Winchesters. Although, she hated my guts, so maybe she’d just see killing me as a bonus. Either way, I wasn’t waiting around to find out.

So we skipped, leaving the key in the room, and without telling reception. We didn’t need Bela inquiring at the desk and finding we’d checked out. With any luck, she wouldn’t turn up until very late, long after we were gone.

“Where are we going, though?” I asked, hauling my duffle into the back seat.

“As far as possible,” Dean said. “Pick a direction.”

I hesitated. Dean had three weeks left and he actually seemed willing, at this point, to talk about it. It seemed to me that this was an opportunity to go where the best resources were. We still had time to save him.

“Why don’t we go home?” I suggested. “I still think Dad’s got books I could...” I stopped, not wanting to tell Dean about my plan to ty and bring him back after death. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up. What if I couldn’t? Much better to keep looking for a better idea.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. You miss your Dad, right? I guess we can take a little trip, make you less homesick, whatta you say, Sammy?”

Sam smiled as he shut the back door on me. It wasn’t a cheerful smile, but it was genuine. Just the slightest hint of his dimples formed.

“If that’s… if it’s what Ellie needs, sure.”

And so, we were able to agree on going home to Sioux Falls, with all of us pretending it wasn’t to make a last ditch effort to save Dean before the hounds came to take him down to Hell.

 

* * *

 

 

We made several attempts to call our abandoned motel room from the road. Dean wanted to gloat at Bela. I was still sure there was something we didn’t know about her, but I kept my mouth shut. At least until I knew whether or not she was planning to murder us.

But it’d be nice to know whether she was the one planning to come into our room, or someone else. Maybe, if someone answered the phone, we could get some idea of what was happening.

Nearing midnight, we were somewhere in Ohio. Dean decided to have another try, and this time, he didn’t put the phone down in frustration.

“Hiya, Bela. Here’s a fun fact you may not know. I felt your hand in my pocket when you swiped that motel receipt.”

There was only the very briefest of pauses, obviously while she said something.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I understand perfectly. See, I noticed something interesting in your hotel room. Something tucked above the door. A herb. Devil’s shoestring? There’s only one use for that: holding hellhounds at bay. So you know what I did? I went back and took another look at your folks’ obit. Turns out they died ten years ago today. You didn’t kill them. A demon did your dirty work. You made a deal, didn’t you Bela? And it’s come due. Is that why you stole the Colt, huh? Try to wiggle out of your deal, our gun for your soul?”

His sentences had mostly rolled into one another, so I guessed he’d either been interrupting her attempts to respond, or she hadn’t tried and he was just delivering a monologue. After he was done, he did leave a brief pause, during which she presumably answered.

“But stealing the Colt wasn’t quite enough, I’m guessing,” he said.

Sam looked back at me while Dean listened to Bela’s reply. It was hard to see him that well in the dark car, but I was guessing his eyes were that deep concerned brown that looked bottomless.

“Really!” Dean said. “Wow, demons untrustworthy? Shocker! That’s uh… kind of a tight deadline too. What time is it? Well, look at that, almost midnight.” Another pause. “Sweetheart, we are weeks past help.” And then again.

Was she begging him for help? After what she’d done?

“You know what, you’re right, you don’t,” said Dean. “But you know what the bitch of the bunch is? If you would have just come to us sooner and asked for help we probably could have taken the Colt and saved you.”

We would have tried, at the very least. And a promise to try from the Winchesters had to be worth more than any demon’s offer to renegotiate a contract.

Even though she’d taken the Colt, and even though she’d lied and deceived us... Even though she shot Sam, I still didn’t think Bela deserved to die. And especially not so horribly, being doomed to eternity in Hell itself.

Yeah, so she supposedly did a deal to kill her parents, but that still didn’t quite tally up to me. Stealing and lying and being ruthless were definitely connected with Bela being capable of wishing her family dead. But why? Their deaths made her incredibly rich, yet she’d still started dealing in stolen occult items. She continued to make vast sums, despite not needing it. And then she paid us a fortune when we hadn’t asked her for anything.

Greedy people don’t throw money around. So why give away her soul just to off her parents and get the cash?

I wished Dean would put her on speaker, or let me talk to her. It was too late to do anything, but I wanted to know why. It was too late to help her. But I thought she should at least get the chance to explain her motives before the hounds came.

“And who told you that?” Dean asked her. Then he questioned her further. “She? Lilith? Why should I believe you? This can’t help you, Bela, not now. Why you telling me this?”

Whatever reason she gave, Dean was done with her. “I’ll see you in Hell,” he said, hanging up, putting the phone down and getting his right hand back on the wheel.

_See you in Hell_ , he said. And I was one hundred percent sure he meant it literally.

 

* * *

 

We drove all night, and into the next day. We took turns, one driving, one keeping them awake and one sleeping in the back. With a couple of meal stops, we made it back home to Sioux Falls in just over fourteen hours. Dean was someone who believed that speed limits are just a suggestion.

It was a little after nine o’clock when we pulled into the yard. Still early enough for some breakfast.

The super subtle roar of the Impala’s engine alerted Dad before we’d even stopped, and he was waiting on the porch for us. I was in the front, taking my turn and keeping Dean company for the last leg. As soon as the car rolled to a stop, I was out before Dean had time to put it in park.

Shut up. I loved my Dad, okay.

He retained his grumpy demeanour as I ran up the steps and launched myself at him. But his grip on me when I hugged him betrayed his real feelings.

After a couple of seconds, he let go and put his hands on my shoulders, holding me a little apart from him, so he could examine my face. He peered at me, taking in the huge bruise on my forehead.

“Are you alright?” he asked. “Your head…”

I knew he was worried about my previous head wound, and I couldn’t blame him for that. I was smart enough to be cautious about bumps to the head. It was well over a year, but a cracked skull isn’t something you should be casual about. Both Sam and Dean were agreed, and always made sure to check very carefully for a concussion or other signs of damage.

Hunters tend to be reckless and live dangerously, but we’re not freakin’ stupid.

“I’m okay,” I told Dad. “I got knocked out, but it feels mostly fine now. Just a bit sore.”

“Follow my finger,” he said, and I did, as he moved it left, right, up and down in front of my eyes. Quicker and easier to just do it than argue about how I wasn’t concussed and knew what I was doing.

Sam was sitting with the back door open, yawning. He’d only woken up just as we arrived. Dean came up the stairs to stand beside Dad and me.

“She got hit with a shovel,” he said. “You wanna tell him why, Princess?”

“I was being a diversion,” I said defensively. “So Sam could get the victim out the window.”

“Uh huh,” Dean said. “Bobby, you ever seen your daughter’s diversions?”

“Dean…” I moaned.

“I usually got her on backup,” Dad said, and with what looked almost like a smile. Maybe Dean’s dobbing wouldn’t lead to an argument…

“She’s freakin’ insane,” Dean said, and I could see the proud little smile he tried to hide. “Dunno what we’d do without her, right Sammy?”

“Right,” Sam said, coming up behind me. “No one in the world as distracting as Ellie.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant it as a compliment or not, but Sam wasn’t usually inclined to insult me. “It’s a gift,” I said.

 

* * *

 

 

We all got straight to work. I headed to the library, with some books already in mind. Some stuff I hadn’t scanned yet, but I knew from my database that there might be something in them.

Dad had found something he wanted to show us, so he and Sam talked through that. Dean left the house again pretty much right away. There wasn’t enough beer, and going to get more was definitely a top priority.

We worked all day, stopping briefly for lunch. Then there was an afternoon of frantically rifling through books. While the others were still focusing on ways to break the contract, I focused on my own idea. Bela had revealed this demon, Lilith, was the one who held Dean’s contract, but Dad had read something different. Either way, I was still sure my back-up plan was worth pursuing.

Even if we figured out whether it _was_ Lilith who had the contract (and why would Bela bother to lie at that point?), we still had to find her. And figure out how to get Dean free from the deal. Without triggering the clause that would end in Sam dying too.

I flipped through page after page, speed reading and searching for keywords. By the time it got dark out, it was hard to tell when my eyes were watering from strain, and when I was just crying from frustration. They’d sort of merged into one.

I gave up for the night and got up to make dinner. I decided to roast some actual vegetables, which always made Sam’s day. And Dean didn’t mind a good roast dinner either. It appealed to his secret domestic desires.

Sam thought something Dad had found might have some real potential. It was a reference to someone called the “King of the Crossroads”. After dinner, Dad sat Dean down to show him, while Sam and I did the dishes.

“Thanks,” he said, as I rolled up my sleeves to get washing.

“Thank _you_ ,” I replied. “Usually I do this on my own.”

“No, for yesterday,” he said. “With Benton. You were right.”

The whole Doc Benton scenario seemed weeks away. Had it really only been twenty-four hours since we threw him into a fridge and buried him deep as we could dig?

“Well, your heart was in the right place,” I said. “We’re all getting desperate.”

Sam took a heavy tray from me. His huge hands made it seem so much smaller and with his strength it seemed to weigh nothing at all.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “And the closer we get, the clearer that is to me. I’ve gotta…”

“Uh uh!” I scolded him, scrubbing at a plate with added vigour. “This is _not_ your fault, Sam. Not yours, or mine, or Dad’s!”

It didn’t seem like the appropriate time to mention it. It never seemed appropriate, even quietly to myself, in the dark. But the truth was, Dean had made a choice. He was grieving and desperate and not thinking properly when he did it, but the dark, terrible circumstances behind it didn’t make it any less true. In fact, he’d made more than one choice.

He’d driven Dad and I away so we couldn’t stop him. He’d put together what he needed to make a deal. He’d driven to the crossroads. He’d summoned a demon, made a deal with her and accepted her unusually harsh terms. He’d been offered only one year and he took it.

There was a whole lot of backstory to who Dean was and why he’d made his choices. His feelings of intense protectiveness towards Sam were far more complex than my single college psychology elective could ever qualify me to comment on. Was Dean to blame for his decisions? Was he in a fit mental state to make that kind of deal? Would a desperate crossroads deal hold up in a human court of law? Surely diminished responsibility is a thing.

No. I don’t think we can ever say if Dean is to blame for what he did that terrible night. But one thing I did know.

No one else made that decision for him.

“There’s a way out of this, Ellie,” Sam said. “I know there is. And if I haven’t found it…”

“It’s not because you haven’t tried,” I reminded him. “Not knowing the solution to a problem isn’t the same as being the cause of the problem.”

He sighed, gently taking a plate from me. There was some danger of me agitatedly slamming it down in front of him. Maybe it wasn’t fair for me to get mad, but I couldn’t bear that he was putting the blame on himself.

“I know, but…”

“But nothing,” I scolded. “If a werewolf kills a man in Texas tonight, is it my fault?”

“Of course not…”

“No. Because I’m fucking miles away. You were _dead_ Sam. And that’s a shitload further than Texas. You weren’t there when Dean made his deal, so it’s not your fault.”

“Okay,” he said.

But I could tell from his tone that I hadn’t convinced him of a damn thing. I’d just bullied him into agreeing with me to my face. I’d done nothing to heal his breaking heart, nothing to ease the suffering within.

My stupid temper. Rather than helping Sam, I’d just made him feel like I didn’t understand and that he couldn’t confide in me. And by the time we’d finished washing up, I still hadn’t figured out how to apologise for it. Then he was gone, to talk to Dad and Dean about this Crossroad King guy.

I joined them, but it was all business, and I couldn’t get Sam alone again before he went to bed.

I went up too, but I didn’t sleep at all. But then, did I really deserve to?


End file.
